Robots vs Taxes

Robots vs Taxes runs on a simple premise: the same two people who will argue Kenobi lore with a straight face can also be furious about the news, and neither mood has to wait its turn. Pav and Ernesto present it as a Radio Free Brooklyn program, and the energy is brisk, profane and constantly sidetracked. Usually one of them throws out a take and the other stretches it, pokes at it or pulls it back to earth. The episode notes sketch the range. On one side sit Marvel and Disney+ series, Star Wars, The Matrix Resurrections, Spider-Man, Moon Knight and San Diego Comic-Con news. On the other sit Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, the January 6th committee, Fox News, Joe Rogan, the Mar-a-Lago raid and a Supreme Court ruling the hosts meet with grief. The show does not wall those halves off. A gripe about New York heat drifts into a bit about smoking jackets; a memory of a Lowe's employee warning about a rogue planet becomes an argument that conspiracy theory has turned into a business, propped up by Fox News and QAnon. That swerve, from dumb anecdote to pointed claim, is the basic move. Its most structured stretch is a movie-fight series that pits two films against each other. Good Time faces Ninja Scroll in a matchup that spills across 'Hair Dye vs Ninjas Part 1' and 'Hair Dye vs Ninjas Part 2'. 'Wood vs Dolemite' sets Ed Wood against Eddie Murphy's Dolemite film, with real admiration for stubborn outsiders like Ed Wood, Rudy Ray Moore and Tommy Wiseau, though not before turning the internet's 'entanglement' moment into an imaginary late-90s legal thriller. The crudeness is real, but so is the attention: the blue static glow lighting a room in Good Time gets a close read, and the final scene with Connie's brother Nick draws genuine tenderness. The anime talk leans nostalgic, with Ninja Scroll, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Macross Plus and Voltron remembered as a kind of storytelling American animation was not offering. Representation is a steady undercurrent. James Franco being cast as Fidel Castro opens into a conversation about Latino actors getting hired mostly for all-Latino productions, and the notes also flag the police detainment of Ryan Coogler and the Oscars slap. Fantasy casting gets its turn too, with Superman reimagined inside Marvel and drifting toward social justice. The moods are wide but recognizable: warm between the two of them, excited over Mandalorian news, dry about Thor, grave when the headlines are bad and exasperated when they are worse. In 'Always Keep It Right' the pair call it their final episode after five years, trading memories, predictions and a promise to come back in another form. For a first listen, the 'Hair Dye vs Ninjas' pair shows the movie-fight format working, while 'Always Keep It Right' captures the friendship holding the whole thing together. The sign-offs in these episodes all land on the same line about keeping it real versus keeping it right.