I am a bit late in posting the follow up to the previous rant about the persistent captions on Google Play media. They did in fact release an update fixing the captioning problem, but it took about a month to get it.
I ended up using the Google Play Movies & TV app on Roku to avoid the captioning problem. The app for Roku is not the standard app found on Android devices. It was uneffected by this phenomenon. Something I will keep in mind if things go wonky again.
