Release: July 7, 2021
Film: Ready Player One (2018)
Tagline:
Tropes:
- Ass Shove: Critic reinterprets the Easter egg as needing to be shoved up the victor's ass to win the game.
- Catfishing: Parodied in the episode's sketches. Critic ends up on Catfish so he can figure out the identity of a cute girl he's chatting up on a VR game, but her username ("Hyper Fungirl") and avatar (short brown hair and glasses) makes it immediately clear it's Hyper Fangirl. Nev tells Critic that it's really not the kind of surprise they go for on the show, but Critic insists she must be using the avatar so Critic won't know she's ugly (as she has a small zit). Then at the end of the review, it's revealed that Benny was actually Hyper Fungirl, and Critic has to come to terms with those feelings.
- Dualvertisement: The ad break promotes two sponsors, Stamps.com and Freshly. The setup is that two detectives come across a man who died from excitement after learning about Stamps.com, then one detective blows up from excitement as well, so the other detective decides to raid the murder victim's fridge and comes across a Freshly meal.
- G.I.R.L.: The cute girl online that Critic was chatting up, who initially seemed to be Hyper Fangirl, turned out to just be Benny.
- Informed Deformity: As a parody of Samantha's underwhelming birthmark, Critic treats Hyper like she's horribly disfigured because she has a small zit on her face.
- A Rare Sentence: Critic says about Sorrento being boring, "This dude is Keanu Reeves from Dracula!... which is one of the weirdest phrases I've said in a minute."
- Rooting for the Empire: Discussed when Critic proposes a way to make Sorrento more interesting by having him be a fan of pop culture, but for the wrong reasons, with one proposed example being him liking RoboCop (1987), but wanting the corporate bad guys to win.
- Self-Deprecation: Critic responds to Halliday's desire to "go backwards in time" with, "If you wanna obsess over old stuff, make a webseries ruining things people love! Preferably in a hat and tie!"
