BUDAPEST, HUNGARY - JULY 21: Race winner Oscar Piastri of Australia and McLaren celebrates his maiden race win on the podium during the F1 Grand Prix of Hungary at Hungaroring on July 21, 2024 in Budapest, Hungary. (Photo by Mark Thompson/Getty Images)
something about this picture has me devastated. he was 17 here.
4 years later he’d make it to f1 and a year after that his best friend would join him. 9 years later and they wouldn’t be able to look at eachother, but he’d have the championship.
sometimes i wonder if lewis looks at him now occasionally and sees this nico, the teenager he spent so many hours with, so many late nights, so many hushed conversations.
his name is forever nestled in between lewis’ on the trophy. and this boy would have been overjoyed to hear it.
Probably the biggest problem with The Acolyte is what really bit it in the ass in the finale--its main characters did things because of the plot, not because they were organically built up or made sense. I could mostly overlook it in previous episodes because it felt like there was still more time to reveal the characters' motivations, but now that we're at the end, there's just so little throughline for either of the twins' characterizations.
Mae makes the most sense, you get why she was so angry, she always wanted Osha to stay with her, of course she'd drop everything when Osha was alive, but then suddenly she's just completely okay with Qimir erasing her memories of Osha? Of giving up that relationship that drove her the entire time--and Qimir says this was permanent, I doubt Mae had reason to think otherwise--in half a second flat, not just physically separating her from Osha, but erasing her entire relationship with her??
And Osha makes even less sense, we all joke that about how hot Manny Jacinto is and how he ~seduced her to the dark side, but honestly her motivations just seemed utterly gone in the previous episode, she's 100% ready to drop everything she believed in and go with him just because? And up to this point she's barely shown any interest in her connection to Mae, it's all "tell not show" that Osha cared about her, we're told that it was her biggest wound, we're told that she felt that connection, but we don't really see it until suddenly she's running away with Mae because apparently all along she felt that pull towards her?
Intellectually, there are reasons given in the show, but I didn't feel any of them, it was more "Osha behaves this way because the plot needs her to behave this way." It's the same reason Sol can't say, "It really looked like your mother was going to kill you when she started Force-dissolving you, so I reacted without realizing what she was doing." because if he's allowed to explain, then the plot falls apart. The plot demands that he half-ass his explanation rather than because that felt natural to Sol's character.
Things happen because the characters need to get from point A to point B, so point C can happen, rather than because the characters felt like they would actually do that. And it's worse because these are your main characters, the entire plot of the show is set around them.
Only when their instagram stories appear together I realize they have almost identical pfp styles lol. Hoping to see more of them sharing a podium in the remaining of the season!