Tom Segura has teamed up with Netflix to deliver a deranged anthology of sketch comedy that feels like The Twilight Zone had a love child with South Park. Across six twenty-ish-minute themed episodes, Bad Thoughts delivers a litany of sketches, some better than others, so I thought it might be fun to go through them and provide a little micro-review of each. There are lots of fun ideas and silly gags in these that are worth pointing out individually that I couldn’t fit in the main review for fear of spoilers.
So, spoilers to follow, obviously. Let me know some of your favourites in the comments.
Episode 1, “Jobs”
The opening vignette follows Segura as a cool international assassin who has a clutch of very simple rules he can’t stop breaking. What starts as a pastiche of action thrillers quickly devolves into an absurd farce wherein Segura, naked from the waist down and covered in his own excrement, accidentally shoots a baby while trying to kill himself.
The best Episode 1 of Dark Thoughts has to offer is a low-key middle chapter about an Italian – a clean-shaven Segura in a very funny wig – who gets a job at a care home for the elderly for what initially seem to be altruistic reasons but are quickly revealed to be sexual ones. The smartest flourish here is that the whole thing is presented in the manner of an A24 trailer.
In the closer, Segura plays a VR headset-wearing IT guy named Cyrus who is fixing company servers during a meeting using exaggerated sexual role-play that becomes increasingly unhinged as it goes. Nobody in the meeting seems to notice except Evan (Robert Iler), who becomes the Segura character’s nemesis by eating his slice of birthday cake as revenge.
Episode 2, “Success”
The opening sketch of the second episode is a bizarre sequel to the first episode’s closer, with Evan finding himself in the midst of an alien invasion that quickly takes a turn when his only ally suggests an outside-the-box solution. The last-minute stinger is that Evan is a character in a VR game that Segura’s IT guy is selling; his torment has become endless.
Episode 2 also features an extended Steven Seagal send-up with Segura playing the former action icon turned ridiculous eccentric in a fat suit that keeps him seated and immobile even during action scenes. This is brilliant stuff – I hope Seagal doesn’t see it, though.
The final vignette in Dark Thoughts Episode 2 is the longest yet, a very Black Mirror-esque short about a wildly successful country musician who is mocked for being out of touch and responds by kidnapping a bunch of his fans for a “jam session” that’ll hopefully inspire his next album. As in Episode 1, this also ends on a cliffhanger, leading into the next episode.
Tom Segura and Christina P in Bad Thoughts | Image via Netflix
Episode 3, “Family”
The continuation of the Rex Henley storyline takes up half of the episode, aping rural horror flicks as the jam session turns into a more personal torment of Rex’s latest victim, Shelly. She spends the episode on the run in official Rex merchandise while Rex tries to use her for artistic inspiration. The payoff is funny – Shelly talks Rex into killing one of the theatre actors he has hired to cosplay as a North Korean guard instead of her – and then turns bleak, as Rex enjoys unprecedented success with his new Korean country album, kills thousands more fans, and is never held to account for any of it.
Segura plays himself in the second sketch, attending a school play with his real-life wife Christina P which very quickly devolves into a recreation of the Vietnam War directed by Segura’s father. This is a low-key palate cleanser that is well-positioned following the Rex Henley two-parter.
Styled to resemble a kitsch black-and-white film – with the aspect ratio to match – the final part of Episode 3 finds Segura as Joseph, a man who has moved to France to be with a woman who promptly stands him up. After meeting a cool older guy – not like that – he’s inspired to hook one of the plenty more fish in the sea, and seems to have a bite when he’s lured into the apartment of a beautiful woman beckoning him from the window, like a siren. Joseph is quick to promise to make love to the woman’s twin sister first, as a “favour”, but he’s shocked to discover that the twin is a hideous visage jutting out from the woman’s back. How’s that for a cliffhanger?
Episode 4, “Love”
The climax – perhaps not the best choice of words, granted – of the previous story is basically an extended sex scene set to tinkling piano music as Joseph tries to weigh up quite how far he’s willing to go for the end goal of going to bed with a beautiful woman. As it turns out, pretty far. This is probably the most risqué vignette thus far, but the running commentary and Segura’s reactions make it good for a laugh.
Bobby Lee cameos in the second short as a husband whose dying wife has ordered a “last wish” – to be a fed a sandwich and sexually ravaged by the frontman of a local sandwich chain (played, of course, by a bewigged Segura). There’s little to this beyond Bobby Lee’s aghast reactions, but he’s great in it either way.
Segura plays himself again in the closer of Bad Thoughts Episode 4, a brief aside about political correctness, the sliding scale of slur offensiveness, and who can say which word, as Segura gets into it with a couple of little people who are “fans” of one of his old, more unsavoury bits. But the short takes a last-minute turn when it’s revealed that both pilots are dead and Segura has to land the plane.
Tom Segura in Bad Thoughts | Image via Netflix
Episode 5, “Communication”
As it turns out, Tom Segura’s efforts to fly a plane are really just an extension of the same concerns of taste and decency, with the air traffic controller on the radio being so upset by some of Tom’s previous material that he’s willing to doom the entire flight just to prove a point. Luckily, an Argentinian pilot arrives at the eleventh hour to save the day. When given the option between kinky sex with the male pilot for the remainder of the flight or taking his seat next to the angry little people, Segura chooses the former.
Evan is back from Episode 1 in the second short. While at lunch with his father, he learns the hard way about the success of Cyrus’s VR game, which has now made him a billionaire guru figure and Evan a laughing stock. When Evan confronts Cyrus, he offers to cut him in as a partner and shows him his latest game – an even more immersive product that Evan gets to test. It turns out Cyrus never quite got over that cake thing.
For the first time, an episode’s closing sketch doesn’t end on a cliffhanger. Here, Segura plays himself again and goes on a murderous rampage after a misunderstanding about his coffee order. It’s a quite shockingly violent string of practical effects work with a great payoff.
Episode 6, “Health”
A work retreat takes a turn when an employee makes an uncouth statement and earns the ire of his colleagues, only for support to come from an unusual place. It’s a very lightweight vignette, this, largely reiterating some themes and ideas from previous shorts about the ridiculousness of language policing and how fickle people can be. Amusing, but unmemorable.
Bad Thoughts Episode 6 elects not to have a third short and instead has an extra-long – pun very much intended – second. Here, Segura plays a schlubby lecturer who joins a gym with green juice shots that turn out to radically increase the size of one’s manhood. The sight gag of floppy prosthetic phalluses does all of the heavy lifting here – literally, sometimes; Tom’s eventually gets so big that he has to sling it over his shoulder – but it’s making a broader metaphorical point that you hopefully don’t need me to explain.
That’s one way to end a series, I guess.
