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Onomarchus posted:If Laurie did kill herself at the end, there's a plothole or at least a flaw in her plan to make it look like an accidental death. Matt and/or Nora, if they are alive on the planet anyway, can blow the accident story out of the water (pun intended) if they tell people about the scuba suicide conversation they all had in the van. Of course Laurie could be relying on their consideration to keep quiet, but Matt and Nora are the kind of people who like to tell the truth and drat the consequences, except when they are doing the opposite of that. Laurie was assuming Nora was planning on going through the machine. But since she told her kids she was just hanging out, not scuba-diving in Australia, what she did was already off from the perfect suicide plan Nora gave her.
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May 25, 2017 03:50
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theBeaz posted:Doesn't she know they're dead? They found the bodies. So it's still as Laurie said: she knows her kids are dead and she can't have closure because of an unanswered question. She knows they didn't depart. Yeah but they only found the bodies years later, IIRC.
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May 25, 2017 06:07
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JethroMcB posted:Man, "B.J. and the A.C." was bad. The only out-and-out bad episode of this show (And even then it had one of my favorite moments, with the Guilty Remnant reps handing Tom the blank pamphlet.) That's my least favorite of the show but I think it was necessary to have a relatively mundane episode early on as a foundation for the rest to build on.
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May 26, 2017 02:07
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This episode made me realize this season was never about the end of the world, it was about people wanting the world to end because that would be easier than keeping going. Just like Kevin sabotaged his relationships because that was easier.
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May 29, 2017 04:53
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Sometimes people use the word "atheist" colloquially to mean something more like a general skeptic, like someone who doesn't believe in gods or souls or the afterlife etc.Invalid Validation posted:I think the flashbacks have been a little much this season, I don't know why there is so much of it when there wasn't any need for it in season 2. There were a few in season 2. During the "Homeward Bound" karaoke scene, for example.
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May 30, 2017 05:15
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Escobarbarian posted:What an episode, though! drat! Although Kevin's overall arc over the course of the series does seem a little wobbly. What makes you say that? His central internal conflict in this episode goes right back to the conversation he had with his dad in seasone one's "The Garveys At Their Best", the starting point for his whole story.
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May 30, 2017 10:23
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Fast Luck posted:I'm kind of getting whiplash with the Kevin and Nora story. When the Homeward Bound scene happened I was totally in and thought this relationship is so important, then when they blow up in G'Day Melbourne I figured, hmm, I assumed they belonged together but were they really just codependent and using one another and it was an unhealthy thing all along? Wow, maybe so! But then fastforward and Dead Kevin is having his Homeward Bound 2.0 moment... so it's like oh, uhh, even though their relationship actually is pretty hosed up he really does love Nora and just lost his head in the moment during that fight, or just ran away because he's a coward. Okay... It's not just about him and Nora, since he also sabotaged his marriage to Laurie the same way. But as for his relationship with Nora, I think its not one way or the other; it has the potential to be healthy but both of them have a similar major flaw holding them back. Kevin self-sabotages because he's afraid of vulnerability, and because he feels like he has to act all the time and he resents that (like how he decided to hide his smoking from Laurie and then blame her for it). With Nora he was able to be more honest at first, but then when his problems got too out-there for her that changed and never went back. On the other hand Nora self-sabotages because some part of her secretly likes being "Nora Cursed"; she likes being a perpetual victim and is afraid to ever move on from that. Think back to one of the very first scenes we see of her where she purposely knocks her coffee over in a cafe just to get a bit of sympathy from the waiter. So now Kevin has confronted his flaws and is as ready as he'll ever be to try again with her. Maybe it will take a lot longer for her to do the same (hence Old Nora/Sarah).
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May 30, 2017 19:34
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Last Chance posted:Not to get too LOSTy on you guys, but wtf is this nun's necklace from ep 301: Wu-Tang logo evolved over the years.
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Jun 1, 2017 06:12
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Maybe part of the reason people who really liked season one feel let down by the other two is because the core theme has shifted over time. It started out as a story about how people deal with grief and loss, but its become more about how people deal with the unknown and unexplained. I can see why it would be annoying, hacky, lazy pretentious, etc. if every show threw a bunch of poo poo at the wall and refused to explain any of it by the end. But why we can't have this one show built around ambiguity as its core concept? IMO the direct payoffs we have gotten have been very satisfying, so its not fair to assume the lack of other answers is due to laziness or an inability to execute them. Also its weird how people assign everything in the show to Lindelof and his personal proclivities. There is a whole team of writers. Lord Krangdar fucked around with this message at 03:09 on Jun 2, 2017 |
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Jun 2, 2017 03:07
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Oh and people were asking about the significance of moving the show to Australia: The core characters going so far from home showed us that they were really serious about their beliefs (that the world was ending, that Kevin was important, that the departure machine was worth investigating).
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Jun 2, 2017 03:14
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UmOk posted:Nora went for machine. Kevin followed Nora. Everyone else followed Kevin. Those are the plot reasons, but on an earlier page people were asking about the show-runners' motivations. Niwrad posted:The weird cavewoman scene was done to gently caress with Andy Greenwald. The Matt episode from this season was written for a reviewer who said nice things about the show last season. All the Kevin dick jokes came from a joke online about Theroux in his sweatpants. The critics were only inspirations, in the end those were all woven into the show organically (except the dick one which really was just a fun meta wink). The cave-woman scene was a microcosm of the entire show. That Matt episode wasn't just a shout-out to that reviewer, it was inspired by his personal story of tragedy and loss. Any writer is going to be inspired by stuff from their lives. Televisions critics are part of the lives of television writers. Nothing wrong with that. Niwrad posted:The French submarine scene is an example of that. Don't think it added anything to the plot except to be a quirky thing reviewers can fawn over. That, along with Dean and the guy yelling in the airport, showed that people around the world were starting to believe the apocalypse was imminent. It wasn't just the core characters. Lord Krangdar fucked around with this message at 03:26 on Jun 2, 2017 |
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Jun 2, 2017 03:21
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UmOk posted:I don't really get why people care about creators intentions or motivations. After something is complete their input and opinions are worthless. Not aiming this at you. Just in general. Normally I'd agree, not sure why this specific show makes me more interested in the intentions behind it than usual. As for the people in this thread criticizing the show, seems that focus is just the result of Lindelof being reduced from a person to a meme. Now its almost like there's a need to pre-emptively hate the finale of this show to prove that he didn't trick us into liking it, or something.
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Jun 2, 2017 03:33
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Niwrad posted:The 10-minute cavewoman scene was bad. Why? That's one of my favorite parts.
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Jun 2, 2017 03:59
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Nichael posted:I don't really understand why Laurie decided to kill herself when she did though. Anyone have any idea? Both times it was because she felt too broken to keep trying to help the broken people around her. From her perspective everyone around her had gotten caught up in shared delusions, and they had already killed one man and were planning on killing Kevin over them. Also she apparently helped lead Nora to her death over a false hope, too. At first she fell back on her usual shtick: manipulating people and lying to them in order to hopefully help steer them onto a healthier path. Like with her and Tommy's placebo hugging cult, or her fake palm-reading business, or her trying to help Kevin deal with his delusions by getting that Muslim woman to pretend to be Evie. But when she spoke to her husband John outside Grace's house he inadvertently revealed that their whole relationship was based on a lie; she thought their love and their palm-reading thing had helped him move past Evie's death, but the whole time he still believed she was alive. And now, worse, he believed Kevin should die to give Evie a message in the afterlife. Later at dinner Kevin Sr. called her out for not actually believing in what they were doing (by relating the story of how she acted when he first started hearing voices), but the problem was she no longer believed in her own alternate agenda either. So when Kevin came back, ready to die, she asked him if he was scared and he said no. She said she wasn't either, and at that point she had decided to die too. I think she realized that, though she still didn't believe it, maybe Kevin was right and there was an afterlife for her. Or the world was ending regardless. Or they were wrong and they were about to drown Kevin over their shared delusions, and she couldn't do anything about it. "They're all gone". "Stop wasting your breath".
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Jun 2, 2017 09:19
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Onomarchus posted:That's not wrong on the whole, but to get back to the quest of why she did it when she did, one answer is that she just got a way to commit suicide while making it look like an accident from Nora. She probably hasn't been super far from suicide for a while, but as the first attempt in that episode showed, she didn't want to do it in a way (with a note even) that looked like a suicide. She got the scuba-diving suicide idea from Nora, but if Nora had used that to kill herself back when she first started dating Kevin in season one it really would have seemed like an accident. For Laurie that plan wouldn't actually work, because Jill and Tommy would eventually find out their grandfather killed their father in Australia and then that same day their Mom, who they had just spoken too, was actually secretly in Australia too having a freak scuba-diving accident. That would be the total opposite of how Nora meant it, to be a quiet and non-suspicious way to go.
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Jun 3, 2017 05:55
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Ausmund posted:What do you guys think the difference between the two Kevins were? I didn't take it that way. Like it wasn't his past vs his present self, or two personalities dueling. Kevin was filling both roles in the scenario, and when he came into contact with himself by the end he was metaphorically confronting himself, not some other version of him.
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Jun 4, 2017 04:58
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What a James Bond style assassin and a GR sponsored president have in common is they both reject family.
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Jun 4, 2017 05:25
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Not seeing anything in her story made the whole episode for me.
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Jun 5, 2017 06:13
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Supercar Gautier posted:I think Nora's story was literally false but emotionally honest. Also the version she told gives her a more palatable excuse why she didn't ever try to reunite with Kevin, or go to Matt's funeral, and so on. "It's just nicer," like the nun says. Kevin's lie earlier in the episode was like trying to erase the past, but her (possible) lie is a better one to rekindle their relationship around because its at least emotionally honest, like you said. Lord Krangdar fucked around with this message at 07:15 on Jun 5, 2017 |
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Jun 5, 2017 07:12
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I'm just reading this Sepinwall interview with Lindelof and one of the hints he gives made me realize the proper answer, for those scientists, to the question about killing a baby to cure cancer was "Who gives a poo poo? I want to depart this world already!".
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Jun 5, 2017 07:23
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Agronox posted:While Nora was explaining where she went I thought that her performance was actually lacking a bit; Carrie Coon's body language and eye contact in the scene is of someone who is lying. Just took a quick look at the scene and yeah, she keeps looking away as if she needs to think up the next bit of the story. Lindelof said he never directly told her or the director how to play the scene, though. Paradoxish posted:That said, I kind of wish they didn't go down this path at all because any kind of reachable destination for the departures just... doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Why wouldn't you just send through the resources and people needed to build a return machine? If the original scientist could build one for Nora, why wouldn't he send at least one more person back? Nora's story doesn't make logical sense, but it feels like these aren't the kind of holes that I'm supposed to be poking in it. I love this show and I'm happy with this ending, but I think the need to be ambiguous is probably its biggest and most consistent weakness, final scene included. For what its worth Lindelof mentioned how ridiculous those elements were in one of his post-finale interviews. Without confirming or denying if it was a lie. Glad to see she explains why Old Nora looks like she has a black eye. Lord Krangdar fucked around with this message at 08:09 on Jun 5, 2017 |
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Jun 5, 2017 08:03
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Fast Luck posted:Nora was getting mad at people lying all episode long. She wouldn't let Kevin back because he was lying and she screamed at a nun for lying, so would she really lie to Kevin? Doesn't seem like it, but then again she got super enraged about the machine and then actually went and got in it, so maybe. But she had also been lying, to herself and everyone around her, all season long about wanting to go through the machine. El Jeffe posted:Now I'm back to wondering why the scientists were so selective about who goes through. As far as I can tell, anyone who fits in the sphere can go through, yet they only allow people who are morally righteous and/or mentally stable. Or maybe they just test whether the subject really wants to go or not? Based on a hint Lindelof said in his exit interview (he said the test was about attachment) I think the correct answer is that curing cancer or not shouldn't matter to the subject, since they're about to leave the world forever anyway. They should be totally single-minded about that resolve. Lord Krangdar fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Jun 5, 2017 |
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Jun 5, 2017 20:00
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Jove posted:Holy poo poo. All Patti ever did to him was try and get him to confront himself.
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Jun 5, 2017 20:12
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oliwan posted:Can someone tell me what was so important about holy Wayne's kids so that we had to spent multiple episodes with them? You've been saying season one was superior the whole time, why don't you tell us? To me the time spent on that plot-line is one reason why the first season was weaker. This finale went back to the tone of season one, isn't that what you wanted? I think you'd get a better reception if you could defend your own opinions (beyond just saying you teach English etc.) instead of always asking others to defend theirs.
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Jun 5, 2017 22:25
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Niwrad posted:It seems like they had a real tight budget which sucks. I saw where Lindelof talked about how money was so tight they couldn't pay for a new intro or theme.That's why they just kept using different songs on the same old intro. To be fair they still got to do a lot. Got to go to a whole new country. The number of episodes was due to scheduling, not budget.
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Jun 5, 2017 23:27
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Dr. Tim Whatley posted:I loved that Kevin's heart thing proved there was nothing supernatural in the show at all. How so?
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Jun 5, 2017 23:34
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Pocket Billiards posted:What would be Nora's motivation for lying about crossing over and then back again? Kevin was right that they needed a lie in order to reconnect and move forward after so long apart, but his wasn't the right lie. Her lie (if it was a lie) allowed her to express the truth, while pushing past the questions of why she didn't go to Matt's funeral, or why she didn't contact Kevin, or why she didn't love her children enough to do absolutely anything to find them again. Even if she didn't literally cross over to the other side she was right that if she did somehow find her kids surviving together after seven years they would have already moved on. Believing that they could be some place happy, even without her, could let her finally let go. When I first watched the episode I didn't really question her story at all, except for feeling surprised that the writers would go there (to the question of where the departures went) at all. But in retrospect so much of the episode is themed around lying, from the nun's sexcapades to Nora saying "I never lie" at the beginning which itself is a huge lie. That entire plotline was based on the lie she told herself and everyone else, that she planned to expose the LADR project as a fraud. And Laurie being alive after an entire episode leading up to her implied suicide is, to me, a clue not to trust what we don't actually see. We don't actually see Nora's story. Lord Krangdar fucked around with this message at 02:48 on Jun 6, 2017 |
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Jun 6, 2017 02:46
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Boris Galerkin posted:Adding in extra details is a thing people do when they're lying though. See: the poo poo that didn't happen thread. That and looking over to the side and around the room when they're thinking up the next details, which she was also doing.
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Jun 6, 2017 07:28
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bagrada posted:Final comment is they say "...What?" way too much. In response to questions they weren't expecting, in response to questions they didn't hear, in response to completely hosed up things happening. It should be a drinking game to take a shot every time someone replies with that. If I was smarter I'd try to figure out if that was one of the themes and if it meant something. I assume it's not bad writing. But its one of those things that happens a lot in real life and almost never in scripted fiction, so it feels uncanny valley or something. I dunno. That's exactly why; because it happens a lot in real life. Because the show sometimes went so far into the surreal, absurd, and meta they needed to balance those parts with other moments of extreme realism and mundanity. UmOk posted:This show ties in with Prometheus. In more ways than one. I know other writers and key creative talents were involved, but it feels like this is what Lindelof was working towards with his whole career so far. The best possible expression of his pet themes. I wonder what he could possibly do next. Canadian Surf Club posted:I am mulling on how the show capped Nora's personal struggle though. By the end, has she moved past the need to feel like a victim? Did the "machine" resolve this for her? Or is her isolation another form of being separate or distinct and drawing the pity of nuns or what have you. Maybe I missed a resolving note on this. Even though I don't think she really went through the machine into another world, I think she honestly believed that her story was the best possible scenario: Her kids were alive and safe, but they had moved on. So she could move on too. Lord Krangdar fucked around with this message at 02:05 on Jun 7, 2017 |
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Jun 7, 2017 02:00
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savinhill posted:Her actions contradict this though, they even contradict the idea that she had completed her journey moving beyond her grief and guilt, and found any type of inner peace. She didn't find any of that until the very last scene. Her pigeons returning late, right at that moment, were symbolic for her journey taking longer than Kevin's. But they both arrived in the same place in the end. Lord Krangdar fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Jun 7, 2017 |
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Jun 7, 2017 06:33
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4Nrst_MIBg
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Jun 9, 2017 04:06
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AndyElusive posted:I believed Nora. It's funny to think that she was lying but he believed her, then imagine after the last scene of the show he starts explaining his story thinking of course she would have to believe him too. But instead she's like "OK no, you lost me at the dong-biometrics".
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Jun 11, 2017 04:36
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Funso Banjo posted:I think the ending was fantastic. You may have misread those interviews. When the idea was first mentioned at their brainstorming session way back before they wrote the rest of the season it was intended to be an unambiguous look at Nora's journey into the world of the departed. But that was just one moment at the start of a long process. Doesn't mean that was still the intended meaning by the time the whole creative process was over. IIRC Perotta vetoed that idea pretty much right away, and then later during the production of the episode they didn't tell even Carrie Coon which way to play the scene. They let her choose.
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Jun 13, 2017 09:45
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I want to know what oliwan thinks of the new Twin Peaks.
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Jun 14, 2017 05:41
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Professor Shark posted:Was there any significance to that issue of National Geographic, in the end? In the end Kevin Sr's voices and all that really did lead him to helping Kevin Jr from the hotel in Perth, he just forgot after coming down from God's Tongue. Niwrad posted:Did they ever explain what the marks on Tommy's back were from during Season 1? I assumed Holy Wayne was abusing him.
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Jun 15, 2017 03:32
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Onomarchus posted:Why did Assassin Kevin shoot Vice President Meg in the second-to-last episode? To show that he was trying to take control of the scenario around him instead of just going along with what he was told.
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Jun 15, 2017 06:36
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Professor Shark posted:The Leftovers novel came in at the library, I'm looking forward to reading it! Having just read the prologue as an appetizer while I finish another novel, the actress and writers really seemed to capture Laurie's tone pre-GR I found the hardcover, new. for only a dollar the other day and also just started it. So far I'm put off by how prosaic the writing is, though, and how little it shows instead of telling. Based on the show I expected a style more like Don Delillo. Interesting to see the differences from the pilot, though.
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Jun 20, 2017 23:05
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Gorn Myson posted:Same, but I'm cautiously optimistic here because aside from some of the casting choices I'm very happy with the movie as it is. So if they're going to do this then I'm curious as to what route they would take with it. There are a lot of nuances and details to the book that just couldn't fit into a film. Like all the parts about the regular people on the streets of Manhattan, or the foreshadowing for the fake monster attack.
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Jun 22, 2017 06:26
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Escobarbarian posted:I hope they stick to the original ending this time. I'm still amazed at how many people say they prefer the film's ending. Yeah I'll never understand that.
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Jun 22, 2017 09:46
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:I'm visiting family tomorrow, and I had to a dream that they wanted to watch this show, but only in quick recap I seem to remember a real movie sorta like this with Patrick Stewart, except instead of dynamite he was a retired, partially senile intelligence agent who kept threatening to release damaging information. There was even some sort of raid on his house, like that.
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Jun 28, 2017 03:15
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