Series / Miracle Workers: End Times

Miracle Workers: End Times is a 2023 series that aired on TBS.

It is the fourth and last edition of the anthology series Miracle Workers. This one is a parody of After the End dramas such as Mad Max. Daniel Radcliffe stars as Sid, who was born after "the Boom" and has spent his whole life wandering the desert wasteland left behind after nuclear war. He meets Freya Exaltada (Geraldine Viswanathan), a merciless warlord who roams the desert, conquering what's left of civilization and exacting tribute.

Naturally, they fall in love, get married, and move to the suburbs—"the suburbs" being a ramshackle village called Boomtown. Sid gets a job for Morris Rubinstein, a sleazy junk dealer (Steve Buscemi), while Freya chafes at the restrictions of domestic life. Will they find happiness?

Karan Soni appears as Freya's robot friend, TI-90 ("Tai"). Jon Bass plays Scraps, a human being who walks on two legs and speaks English but in all other respects acts exactly like Freya's pet dog.

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Tropes:

• Action Girl: Freya Exaltada was a fearsome warlord (warlady?) in the wasteland who shook down people to get necessary resources and killed anyone who defied her. She mellows however on getting married to Sid.
• Actor Allusion: In episode 4, "Grouping Ceremony", Sid is very surprised to find out that the citizens of Boomtown are sorted into five groups, and that one of them, Malicious, is "actively evil." ("That doesn't seem like something you'd want to encourage."). The five groups even have differently colored banners. The allusion to the Harry Potter series and the Hogwarts houses, and Slytherin the evil house, is obvious.
• After the End: "The Boom" was a nuclear war that wiped out civilization. The village of Boomtown is apparently the only human habitation within a thousand miles.
• Amazon Chaser: Wimpy Sid is utterly enamored of his scary warlord wife Freya.
• And Then What? : In "The End", Tai is initially eager to help Neural Net lead a robot uprising and invade Boomtown after feeling like Freya would rather settle down and have a baby than be his best friend, but starts to show regret when Neural Net admits that they'll probably just go through the same autonomous motions for the rest of their life after conquering the place.
• Anti-Climax: Outright stated by Sid in "The End" when they finish John Christ's signal to take down Neural Net and it just shuts her television off, with him then adding he was hoping for some kind of explosion.
• Aside Glance: At the end of "The End", the last episode, Boomtown is having a festival. Morris gets excited about getting his face painted and says "I'm gonna be a tiger! Rawr!" Then he looks straight at the camera and says "And that was the last thing I ever said." (It is in fact Steve Buscemi's last line.)
• Audible Sharpness: For an axe of all things, as there's somehow a zing when Freya pulls out her axe from behind her back to attack Sid.
• Arm Cannon: Tai can shapeshift his right arm into a laser gun. He does this during the big fight in the season finale.
• Back for the Finale: Lolly Adefope returns to the cast for the last two episodes as Neural Net.
• Bad "Bad Acting": Freya's incredibly awful acting when performing as the lead in Morris's stage production of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.
• Becoming the Mask: In The Tag of "Grouping Ceremony", Scraps is still referring to himself as Professor Scraps and grading term papers instead of acting like a dog after Morris involved him in a scheme to get his son Tim into a specific career path.
• Black Comedy:
  • Throughout, as Sid is a road warrior and Freya is a warlord in a post-apocalyptic hellscape. For the big dinner party with Morris, Sid comes out wearing an absurd coat with tassels and hat and says he "found it on the corpse of an old train conductor."
  • The Mailman vs. Dog plot between Scraps and the mailman ends with Scraps, who is in fact a human being, murdering the mailman.
  • Episode 7 ends with Freya and Scraps telling Sid that they burned down Scraps's ("Roland's") old village and strongly implies that they killed Scraps's whole family. Sid is disturbed.
  Sid: That is by far the darkest thing you have ever done!
• Blank White Void: In episode 3 Freya and Sid have couples sex therapy, in which they use Tai's neural simulator to enact kinky scenarios. When they aren't simulating, they're in a blank white void.
• Cheerful A.I.: Morris's "wife" Holly is a sentient hologram he obtained after his second failed relationship, who's programmed to be a completely subservient Extreme Doormat Housewife that agrees with Morris' sexist opinions. She also considers Freya stuffing Morris' head into his own ass as a display of his remarkable flexibility rather than a danger. But that gets subverted in ''Olympus" when she leaves him upon discovering Morris still carries a thing with the skeletal remains of a old classmate.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: Morris' son has a literal case of this, which is a bit of a liability when you live in a hostile wasteland.
• Corrupted Character Copy: John Christ to John Connor, a Future Badass destined to free humanity from robot tyranny. While both have the same first name, John Christ is overly arrogant over being The Chosen One and uses extremist methods in sticking it to the man.
• Cut Himself Shaving: Morris comes to work cut, bruised, and on a crutch after Freya beat him up. He tells Sid that he slipped in the shower.
• Dance Battler: In "The End", Sid and Freya literally dance while shooting and throwing axes in order to evade the robots' shots and help shut down their army.
• Dead Guy Junior: The finale reveals that Sid and Freya named their baby Linda, after Linda the HOA president who took a bullet for Freya in the Battle of Boomtown.
• Defector from Decadence: "Olympus" reveals that Freya came from a utopian society based in the sky, coming to the ground to fulfill her dream of being a warlord.
• Decapitation Presentation: In the second episode Freya sets up the heads of her enemies on her fence posts. They're rigged to grunt "When the Saints go Marching In" when plugged up to a generator. It gets her a letter from the HOA for unauthorized lawn ornamentation, starting her subplot of the episode.
• Distant Finale: The end of the last episode, "The End" skips forward a year. Freya now rules Boomtown as president of the HOA, and she and Sid are raising their baby. Also, with his legs blown off, Tai is in a wheelchair being pushed by Morris.
• The End: The season (and series) finale is titled "The End". The residents of Boomtown fight a battle against a robot army bent on wiping out the human race.
• Fantastic Racism: Morris is bigoted towards both "wastelanders" like Freya and Sid and robots, saying "I didn't take you two to be a couple of robot lovers" after meeting Tai.
• Fetishes Are Weird: In episode 3 Freya and Sid explore their fetishes in an attempt to revitalize their sex life. She likes being tortured, while he is sexually attracted to... boulders.
• Formal Full Array of Cutlery: Parodied. As the foursome sits down to a dinner of cockroaches and rats, Morris corrects Sid, pointing out that he is using his cockroach fork when he should be using his rat fork.
• Grouped for Your Convenience: In "Grouping Ceremony", there are five groups that all adolescents are sorted into upon reaching adulthood: Strong, Heroic, Wise, Kind, and Malicious. Morris was Strong in his youth, despite being an unmuscular schemer in the present, and wants his son to follow in his footsteps.
• Growing Up Sucks: The B-Plot of "Grouping Ceremony" has Freya trying and failing to maintain her old lifestyle of wild partying with Tai now that she's older and her body can't regenerate energy as easily as swapping in a new battery.
• Hangover Sensitivity: The B-plot of episode 4, "Grouping Ceremony", as Freya has a hangover after a wild night partying with Tai, and is disturbed, as this is a sign of aging.
• Happiness in Slavery: In "Roland Proudheart", Scraps is "liberated" from Freya and reunited with his wife and children, while Freya is captured and forced to become his pet. He quickly grows to hate his new freedom, as he finds he actually has to work all day and spend time with his family at night, whereas Freya relishes her new bondage because there are barely any expectations placed upon her. In the end, Scraps agrees to become her war dog again and together, they burn his old hometown to the ground.
• Heel–Face Turn: Two examples in "The End".
  • Morris is initially willing to sell out the town to the invading robots, and then annoys Neural Net into sparing him if he stays out of the battle, but watching his fellow humans get slaughtered causes him to reevaluate his cowardice and leads to him offering shelter in his junkyard at a key moment.
  • Tai, after being subjected to a "The Reason You Suck" Speech by Freya, pulls the remains of torso to the center of town to redeem himself by finishing John Christ's signal broadcast to disable Neural Net.
• Human Pet: "Scraps", played by Jon Bass, who speaks English and walks on two legs but in all other respects acts exactly like a dog. In episode 4 he's idly singing "You're really a human/you've been brainwashed by your captors/you should kill them and go back to your old life." Then he stops and wonders why that song is stuck in his head. Later, "Roland Proudheart" reveals that he used to be the leader of a small town that resisted one of Freya's raids. Eventually, she defeated him and broke him enough that he became her war dog, with no memory of his past life... until his wife arranged for him to be kidnapped and brought home.
• I Was Quite a Looker: Morris shows Sid a photo of himself as a young and very muscular man. Sid finds it disturbing.
• Laughing Mad: Dr. Crazybrainz, "the only doctor in Boomtown," laughs maniacally as he says he's the only doctor in Boomtown because all the other doctors were his patients.
• Mailman vs. Dog: Scraps, being basically a human dog, screams "Get out of here! I'm going to kill you!", every time the mailman comes. But because Scraps is human, he's able to hunt the mailman down and actually kill him.
• Morning Sickness: How Sid and Freya find out that she is pregnant. Freya denies to Dr. Crazybrains that she has been "violently nauseous", then vomits into a bucket.
• Multiple Head Case: Morris' son Tim, who plays an important role in "Grouping Ceremony", has two sentient heads. Morris explains to Sid that he had Tim with an ex-wife that was both figuratively and literally toxic.
• Mummies at the Dinner Table: Morris' 40 year high school reunion is with nothing but the corpses of his schoolmates, since they all died in The Boom. He is hesitant at first but quickly gets into pretending they're all not dead, making out with one of them.
• Mundane Luxury: Sid is so used to harsh wasteland life that he expects he'll have to sit in a hole with a mutant when he starts working for Morris. He's pleasantly surprised when he's given his own modest desk and chair.
• Obviously Evil: In "Grouping Ceremony", one of the five groups is Malicious. Sid immediately identifies the Malicious answer in a test exam as the one that settles a confrontation between an innocent person and a marauder by killing them both and dancing in their blood, and is later incredulous that everyone's just letting all of the Malicious people group together at the ceremony instead of immediately dealing with them.
• Only Sane Man: Sid's usual role, especially in "Roland Proudheart" when outright mortified that Freya and Scraps burned down the latter's village to the ground and did not get an clear answer if Scraps's family survived.
• Of Corsets Sexy: Freya is forced to wear a very fetish-y corset when she is captured and made to be Scraps's—uh, Roland's—dog in episode 7.
  Freya: You forced me to wear this ridiculous outfit! Which by the way I am killing.
• Powerful People Are Subs: Warlord Freya's greatest sexual fantasy is being bound and tortured by a mechanic wearing a welding mask.
• Pun: Sid and Freya are impressed by Morris's home, which Morris calls "an authentic McMansion from the 2020s." In fact it actually is an abandoned McDonald's.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Tai the android flashes red laser eyes when he goes into attack mode.
• Retraux: The opening titles are done in a deliberately cheap style mimicking a low-budget 1980s action movie.
• Scavenger World: This in fact is Morris's business, dealing in junk and what's left of the fragments of civilization. Morris isn't wrong when he says of the stuff he sells that "It's not trash, it's junk."
• Scenery Censor: A can with brushes obscures Morris's privates as Tai does a nude painting of him in "Olympus".
• Screw Yourself: Near the end of the "Grouping Ceremony" B-plot focusing on Freya and Tai, Tai offers to take Freya to a cloning party where people make out with copies of themselves. He then adds that the parties always end with half the partygoers getting shot and the survivors left to wonder if they are the original or the clone.
• Slap-Slap-Kiss: To the point of absurdity at the start of the first episode. Freya's war party stumbles upon Sid in the desert. She punches him a lot. He stabs her in the leg. She calls him a "tough little cockroach" and he calls her a "psychotic bitch." Then they kiss.
  Scraps: I did not see that coming.
• Stat-O-Vision: Tai has Terminator-style robot vision, which is used in the first episode for a gag in which he seems to be about to attack Freya but instead greets her as an old friend.
• Stronger Than They Look: In "Grouping Ceremony", Morris is convinced that his son can make it into the "Strong" group despite his appearance after the meek Sid notices he's dropped his own keys under his desk and picks the desk up single-handedly to retrieve them.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: In the first episode, Freya gets Sid's job back by beating the hell out of Morris. The next morning Sid finds Morris cut up and bruised and using a crutch and asks what happened. Morris says "I slipped getting out of the shower. I certainly didn't get my esophagus pulled out of my butthole."
• Take That!: "Grouping Ceremony" is an entire episode that mocks Divergent, as Morris frets over getting his son Timmy onto the "Strong" career path, even resorting to an elaborate bribery scheme to accomplish this when it's clear that his son would be judged "Heroic", while Sid repeatedly tries in vain to point out how stupid it is to divide society up by subjectively assessed characteristics, particularly one for the malicious.
• Taking the Bullet: Linda the HOA president does this in the series finale, leaping in front of the energy beam Tai shoots from his Arm Cannon, thus saving Freya.
• Tap on the Head: At the end of "Grouping Ceremony", Morris decides to admit he meddled in order to get Timmy into the "Strong" group like Morris had been in his youth instead of the more-fitting "Heroic" group. However, the administrator behind the grouping decides to preserve her reputation by trying to kill Morris, leading to Timmy proving his heroism by giving her a solid whack to the back of the head, knocking her unconscious.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: In "The End", when Tai tries to shoot Freya for being a "bad friend" but Linda takes the bullet, a now-enraged Freya gives him a rant about how he's been self-centered and not caring about what she wants in life that's so devastating his programming can't handle the shame and makes him self-destruct, splitting himself apart at the waist.
• There Was a Door: Tai bashes his way through the wall of Morris's home so that Freya can escape the awful dinner. This gets Sid fired, so the next morning Freya also bashes her way through the wall of Morris's home to get his job back. All Morris can say is "Couldn't you at least use the other hole?"
• Vertigo Effect: Done with Freya as she seethes with rage and whispers "Must contain rising bloodlust" as Morris's racism and jerkassery drive her to fury.
• Virtuous Character Copy: Ugulus Sleeze from "H.O.A." is one for Baron Vladmir Harkonnen in being an obese figure seeking to settle his family's vendetta against another. But despite his name and mannerisms, Ugulus is actually a nice guy who sought to end the feud with karaoke and preached forgiveness .
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: In "Grouping Ceremony", Timmy and his father Morris initially have an adversarial relationship. But after Morris gets Timmy enrolled in the "Strong" group, Timmy admits that he wants Morris to be proud of him and Morris realizes that he's been more focused on making Timmy more like himself than respecting Timmy's own merits.