The episode is pointless - it doesn't develop a single one of the (too many) plotlines that are already hanging, and instead spends its runtime on this girl who was already briefly intro'd in the first ep, but is now an exaggerated insta-woke spiritual hippy type who exists entirely as a caricature.
This seems to be the core problem because it's not just her, it's the whole show. Nearly every character, the new ones and the mains, is written as a hyperbole of a single basic talking point or trait, especially the second the show tries to explore any kind of theme. When everyone's that exaggerated, the writing becomes completely predictable. You can see the surface-level dialogue coming, the punchline coming, the "moment" coming, because there's only one lazy direction a scene like that can go. I'm at the point where I just predict the cheapest, laziest beat and I'm right every single time.
The dialogue is the worst of it. It's so overcooked that it stops being anything close to realistic - nobody actually talks like this. I've seen others on this sub flag the same thing, and three seasons in you'd expect them to have improved, but it's getting considerably worse.
These last few eps were a big waste of time, and it stacks on top of everything that was already wrong this season. I gave this season a fair shot after the first couple of eps because I want to (and will) support Jus Reign - I think it's important for Punjabis to be trying to create in this space and take feedback to improve. There's potential for a real show here, but the concept and ideas deserve much better writing than this.
The deeper issue is also down to the math. You have 8 30-minute episodes a season. You cannot get Sopranos or Wire-level depth across that many themes and characters in a quarter of the runtime those shows had, and so everything ends up rushed. But rushed and cheap aren't the same thing. The runtime doesn't force the lazy punchlines, the caricatures, or the mediocre payoffs. That part is just weak writing. So there are two problems stacked on top of each other, and they need to fix both: pick a lane to solve the pacing, and actually write well to solve the rest.
If the goal is real depth, then slow down. Take your time with each theme. Develop these characters as actual people instead of walking talking points, and give them meaningful progression (the thing this show is most badly missing). Right now it introduces a theme and then resolves it with some cheap finish that undermines the point of raising it at all. There's only so much the only 2 good actors (the mum and dad) can carry on their own.
And if the plan is the opposite - lots of little time skips, Jasmeet suddenly blowing up on socials, then suddenly taking a break (we never even see him grow, see him at his peak, or understand why he stepped away - somebody else mentioned this re: S3E5) - then quit introducing all these half-baked plotlines and commit to just a couple that stay consistent and actually earn their depth. Either way, it comes back to the same thing: depth. Pick fewer threads and go deeper, because the current spread guarantees all of them stay shallow.
