Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Season

2021-06-19 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
Season
Votey panel for Season
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

This comic is a simple, elegant one-panel joke with a caption.

A man smugly declares: "I went through the whole series non-stop, and it was pretty good, but season 4 sucked." A woman next to him looks at him with mild bewilderment.

The caption below reads: "My favorite activity: Binge-watching Earth's movement around the Sun."

The joke hinges on the double meaning of "season." In the context of television, binge-watching a series and complaining about a weak season is utterly ordinary -- it's the kind of opinion everyone shares after finishing a show. But the caption reframes "season" literally: the man is talking about the actual seasons of the year (spring, summer, fall, winter), and he's been watching Earth orbit the Sun.

"Season 4" -- presumably the fourth year or the fourth actual season in a cycle -- "sucked," which could be a commentary on a particularly bad winter or an uneventful autumn. The comedy comes from applying the casual, consumerist language of TV criticism to the grand cosmic phenomenon of planetary motion, treating the literal turning of the Earth around the Sun as content to be reviewed and rated.

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