Table Readz 4 Cash Is Killing Carl, and They Keep Calling It Friendship

If you want to understand the people running Table Readz 4 Cash, listen to how they talk about Carl.

Across multiple episodes, Mary McKay, Michael M. Michaels, and Flimbert Einstein have described an arrangement in which their incapacitated colleague is repeatedly brought out of a medically induced coma to answer production questions, then put back under when they’re finished with him. They need a password. They have a question about a submission tier. Carl gets another brief appointment with consciousness.

According to Mary’s own account, a doctor warned that this process was causing extensive brain damage. Michael acknowledged that he already knew. He had nevertheless been doing it every week.

There is something particularly revolting about hearing a grown man explain that he repeatedly endangered another person because getting back into his Yahoo account was complicated. Michael speaks with the comfortable entitlement of someone who has never seriously considered that his convenience might be worth less than another human being’s life. Carl’s brain is deteriorating. Michael would like his login details.

Mary’s response reveals an equally hideous character. She proposed grouping their questions together, and worried that their “biggest asset” was becoming less capable of running the show. Her concern had the emotional depth of a complaint about a printer.

Then she clarified that, provided a replacement was available, they could wake Carl and put him back under all day. “Let’s party,” she said.

She also spoke about getting organized to “fast-track this brain death.”

This is the woman who presents herself as an educator and artistic authority. Behind that performance is a petty tyrant who appears to regard responsibility for someone as ownership of them. Her increasingly conspicuous drinking offers no reassuring explanation for any of it. She follows the consequences perfectly well. She wants to know who will do Carl’s work when they finish destroying him.

Flimbert Einstein contributes his own special ugliness. While discussing their position over Carl’s estate, he remarked that pulling the plug could benefit them. He has also supported leaving Carl unconscious because someone else was better at operating the production software.

For all his intellectual posturing, his reasoning becomes remarkably crude whenever someone else’s helplessness creates an opportunity. He can lecture a writer about professional standards and then discuss an incapacitated colleague as a staffing option with an estate attached. Whatever is behind those sunglasses, it has apparently never troubled him with a conscience.

Together, the three have created a little institution in which every vulnerable person becomes a resource and every objection can be answered by referring to their own authority. They invoke their power over Carl’s medical decisions with an appalling sense of satisfaction. They seem to believe that having permission means having character.

Meanwhile, they continue to tell Carl they love him.

That affection deserves to be examined alongside the passwords, the replacement plans, and the casually discussed brain damage. Each declaration costs them nothing. Every practical decision costs Carl something he may never recover.

They are killing him by installments, and their principal concern appears to be whether he can finish the work first.

Anyone considering trusting these people with a script, a job, or a friendship should pay attention. This is how they treat someone who depends on them completely.