Tim and James compare the girls to a swarm. You'd think after fifty years of recapping Battlestar I would be able to make the appropriate fighter-plane analogy but nothing's coming. It's possible that if you have two large lines forming, four hot chicks on skates could conceivably run enough interference between the people and the RoboCops, but I don't know a better word for it. James is like, "So we have to start telling lies." Jumps from A to L, just immediately. "We have to get on our bullhorns and start talking about how the women on rollerskates are known criminals. We have to make the customers understand that they are fugitives from an identity-thieving ring." Tim agrees that they need to work on optimizing their tables, because speaking as somebody who likes girls, especially hot ones, in such a violent way that he can't even think logically when presented with the option, he'd totally buy anything from a cute girl on skates without even asking the price. But then he'd get bashful and not ask for her number, though. Tim arrives at the correct solution, which is that you need to have clearly delineated lines for people to crowd into without even wondering what they're for. It's not because I like Tim so much when I say that he should win this thing. He's the only one they ever show having good ideas, practically, and he says at least one very good thing every week. James starts offering the people (And hey, when I say "theme park," what kind of Americans do you imagine? With the flip flops and the lazy shouty parenting and the supersized drink in their hands and that rolling kind of pregnant gait? I'm not going to say that you are wrong) free bottles of water, and it's the summer, and he makes it clear that the rollerskate girls obviously don't have free water. They barely have pockets. Kristine and Angela are like, "Fuck."
James interviews that "Sales is proactive," and we cut to him stepping in on Kristine's transaction ranting at the people about water, and she's like, "I'll fucking rollerskate over there and buy you some water. I'll bring you back a fucking deep-fried turkey leg if you want. Do not give this man money." She interviews that Arrow is "slimy," like used car salesmen. And that's true. And I love it because it gets results, and because as I say every week I don't know how you do what they do without literally erasing your own existence in the weirdness and awkwardness. But I do think there's a line, and I feel like Arrow crosses it here. It's hard to explain the concept of inner-directed morality to people resistant to the concept, but basically: doing what you can possibly do is not the same as doing what you should do. In fact, there is a tiny little Jiminy in each of us that tells you when you're being tacky. And if you have to start making speeches to shut that Jiminy up, if you have to appeal to some vague "rules" or something, or say it's all-out, or just a game, or whatever, that solves the logical problem, but it doesn't solve the problem that you're not able to make those calls by yourself, from within yourself, and that scares me to death. If you find yourself resorting to some kind of consensus or conventional wisdom about whether something you just did was shady? It was shady. Case closed.













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