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joepinetree posted:That the government gives absolute no fucks about massacring cults and the guilty remnant is something that has been long established in the show. One of my nitpicks with last season's finale - as good as it was - was that, on the anniversary of the Departure, the US Government would not have increased security at a national park directly connected to the event and known to attract zealots. We know the feds take a brute force approach to new wave religious movements in the post-Departure world (don't forget the ATFEC guy in Season 1 implied to Kevin that they could "took care" of Mapleton's GR branch,) you mean to tell me they really would not be in a perimeter around the park armed to the teeth, and that they'd entrust security to local law enforcement and a handful of park rangers? Or that they wouldn't mobilize troops as soon as somebody parked a suspected bomb on the bridge and initiated a countdown? The opening scene was a nice resolution to my pedantry. They might not have been prepared for Meg's stunt, but they sure as hell weren't going to let it go. JethroMcB fucked around with this message at 15:14 on Apr 17, 2017 |
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Apr 17, 2017 14:40
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Aexo posted:I don't get why John is clinging to the belief that Evie is still alive, but it must mean that she is. The entire show has been about people unable to process grief after loss where there's no physical proof that anything happened to them other than simply vanishing, so now John is established as a character who has definitive proof of his loved one's death (There was at least enough left of Evie to confirm her dental records,) yet ironically refuses to accept it. It's a natural evolution for his character - John wasn't able to process the idea that Evie left of her own volition three years ago, why would he now accept her second sudden and far more permanent departure from his life? I know it's going to be important to where his character's story is going - but this early on, who knows where that's going to be. Also why the hell haven't the cleaned up the crater in the ensuing three years? Lawsuit interference? Or did the ATFEC leave it there intentionally as a "warning" to people coming into Jarden?
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Apr 17, 2017 16:17
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Onomarchus posted:Why is everyone so bearded now? Visual shorthand, so that the characters don't have to constantly tell each other "Boy, things sure are different...3 Years Later..."
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Apr 20, 2017 19:03
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Lick! The! Whisk! posted:House of Leaves has been stuck in development hell for literal years at this point, and having actually read The Leftovers even season one kind of barely resembles the book outside the general overall plot points. It's more of a jumping-off point for Lindelof than a blueprint for the show. Yeah, the book is really good but so, so different than what ended up on screen. I think really only Jill's story stayed true to the original text...they backgrounded all the stuff with Kevin and Amy, teasing but never committing, and Laurie's story/the GR obviously went in a wildly different direction. Oh, and we lost all the Spongebob Squarepants stuff with Nora, drat licensing issues.
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Apr 22, 2017 02:23
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Lick! The! Whisk! posted:Aimee, Jill's friend in season one who is written out completely unsatisfyingly and one of the very few things Season 1 does badly. They really shortchanged her in every possible way in the show. She's just living at the Garvey's inexplicably all season then decides to go somewhere else, while the book makes it clear that she came from a kinda rough family situation that got even worse when her mom Departed, leaving her in the legal custody of a creepy, probably abusive stepdad. She and Kevin grow uncomfortably close as they both seek any kind of human connection - and as Book Kevin definitely does not look like Justin Theroux, he's a bit more receptive to a teenager flirting with him than he should be. I understand why they kept her on the show, because she drives/facilitates Jill's rebellious streak, but they kept a lot of extraneous traits that never paid off because they didn't explain who she was a person.
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Apr 22, 2017 03:21
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Onomarchus posted:Huh? Do tell. Book Nora has an obsession with watching Spongebob as a way of remembering her kids, because it was part of their nightly pre-bed ritual. She watches it twice a day and then writes a letter to her children about the episode. There's a bit where Kevin, once they're dating, is kind of resentful that their "date nights" very rarely deviate from having dinner at home and then watching Spongebob on DVD - and that she's absolutely entranced by it, unresponsive to his advances, focused on the screen "As if Spongebob were a Swedish art film from the 1960s."
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Apr 23, 2017 02:06
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Ausmund posted:Also how long until new episodes show up on HBO Now? I think new HBO episodes are available to stream right when the broadcast starts at 9PM EDT.
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Apr 23, 2017 19:42
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the trampoline scene, like everything else on the show, is about 9/11. the poses that Nora and Erika achieve invoke "The Falling Man" (and Tom Junod's Esquire article of same title about how some revisionist history has tried to erase WTC jumpers from the day's events.) the wu-tang clan, being a seminal NYC musical act of the era, is the only fitting soundtrack. by putting the wu-tang symbol on her arm, Nora is forever marked by 9/11, just as we all are, psychologically.
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Apr 24, 2017 23:50
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Fast Luck posted:I was a bit surprised that it turns out the whole time Kevin Sr. had been in Australia he'd had no clue what the hell he's doing. I kind of expected that guy on the news from Australia who claimed he couldn't die, I kind of expected Kevin Sr. to be meeting up with that dude or something but instead it was just his adventure in running around grasping for purpose up until where it took us to the ending of e2. I didn't really dislike it, but there's not that many episodes left. It was kind of a nice subverting of expectations - "Oh, Kevin Sr. didn't go there to meet up with the Cave Man, his 'voices' weren't actually giving him any guidance, he's...just a crazy person" - but yeah, I don't know that it needed 1/6th of the show's remaining running time to make that clear. clown shoes posted:God drat what a beautiful shot Gas can man was definitely rejected by the LADR Microwave team, right? Complaining about being left, and that he couldn't pass somebody's "test."
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May 1, 2017 14:05
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Professor Shark posted:What hat was Kev Sr wearing in the desert? Looked like a Mapleton PD hat to me
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May 1, 2017 15:26
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I really wish/am pretty surprised that HBO or some intrepid TV blogger didn't have a "Primer on Australia's Indigenous Culture Laws" ready to post at 10:01 PM Sunday night. The context was enough for the episode's story but now I want to know more.
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May 2, 2017 19:28
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Great ep overall but I think that final shot rocketed things to another level, despite being maybe the most on-the-nose visual possible. It was just so drat effective and evocative, especially with the nice diegetic fade to black. The sad realization that we're already halfway through the season makes me wonder exactly how much farther any of these plot threads have to run. Given the tease at the beginning of the season, I'm guessing things...aren't going to get a whole lot better from here on out, for any characters we know or the world at large.
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May 8, 2017 05:12
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:One question: did I miss something with the end. There was an explosion... In the hotel? Are we meant to believe that it's tied directly to the book lit on fire? I know Nora was shown at the end, but maybe that was some sort of quick flashback to right before the explosion? That's a stretch, I know. I was rocking my son and I thought I missed something when all that was going down. Not at the hotel and not caused by Kevin, despite him looking up at the building immediately after hearing about it. The show seemed to be doing that cheap narrative trick where somebody refers to an event the audience hasn't been privy to like it's common knowledge, and we'll find out about it later in a big "ohhhh" moment. Based on the preview for next week I think the "explosion" was somewhere else in Melbourne - maybe the airport? Because Matt, Laurie and John's flight is diverted for some reason.
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May 8, 2017 15:07
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:Two kids and a husband, though it all depends on how much she ran the house. He was, and Nora didn't even know it until 3 years after the Departure. Matt told her because he'd learned about it in his campaign to dig up dirt on all of Mapleton's departed (Another entry in Rev. Matt's Greatest Hits)
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May 9, 2017 12:44
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A friend of mine is holding out until the entire season is over before he watches. I understand that from the "no interminable wait between episodes" standpoint, but not from a "I'll take 8 hours of this emotional assault to the dome in very short order" one. Especially if the rest of the season is as intense as this week's episode was.
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May 10, 2017 16:08
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Bulky Bartokomous posted:Obviously Walt's adventures on the island took a turn for the worse despite Hurley's best efforts and 2% of the population has become unstuck in time. October 14th retconned to be the day that Jack fought the Man in Black. When Desmond removed the plug from the Heart of the Island, the missing 2% were pulled through both space and time and "seeded" throughout different points in the Island's history. The cast of Growing Pains built the four-toed statue. Nora's husband was the man on the outrigger shot by Juliette.
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May 12, 2017 12:59
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A bit of narrative frustration with this one. Why wouldn't Matt, who believes himself to be a potential author of the New New Testament, not ask a guy who has allegedly gone through the exact same thing as Kevin about his experience? Not enough to detract from the episode as a whole, however. (And, given Mr. Burton's demeanor, probably not one that would've gone anywhere productive.) A great character ep, not just for Matt. I loved how he thought he was deploying a big drat truth bomb with revealing Kevin's latest delusion to John - only for John to reveal unanticipated maturity and acceptance by saying "No, she was probably right to keep that from me."
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May 15, 2017 03:37
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Pepe Silvia Browne posted:Think of it this way: El Jeffe posted:Oh yeah I guess he might "survive" the lion attack. I'm on board with multiple immortals. Oh, it's one of those things that makes perfect sense in character - Matt's peculiarities, temperament and need for meaning have been established since Two Boats and a Helicopter - just one of those moments where we as the viewer are very cognizant of "This guy can probably give you a realer peace, Matt! Just connect the dots that have been loving laid out for US!" I don't think we've seen in the end of Bill Camp on this show. I can definitely see Kevin returning to the hotel and finding this guy at the bar again, saying "There was this fuckin' nutjob of a 'priest,' so he said, and a...long story short, mate, I've found out that when your body has gone beyond a certain point, you don't go back. So...I Live Here Now." Anyhow...(Episode name spoilers/speculation) Burton says that Jesus didn't rise from the dead, that his twin brother appeared 3 days later and everyone got confused. The title of the penultimate episode of the series is "The Most Powerful Man in the World (and His Identical Twin Brother)" - Until this point I thought they were going to swerve us, somehow, with a second Kevin. Now I think Kevin's going to the other side only to learn that David Burton was the impostor, that he was abusing his brother's infamy for his own gain.
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May 15, 2017 05:26
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sticklefifer posted:I'm kinda surprised there hasn't been a character introduced who's like "I didn't lose anyone, don't know anyone who did, the world was overpopulated anyway, so whatever." If only just for a contrast to everyone's pain and society's fallout from the Departure. "Yeah, it actually benefits humanity as a whole, guys. No biggie." I think that's an impossible point of view to hold because millions upon millions of people vanished without any explanation. Everybody you know may still be there, it didn't affect your life in anyway other than "Huh did you see the news", you can mask it all you want and walk through the world with a blasé attitude, but that's still such a fundamentally loving insane thing that it would eat away at a person's psyche. Basically any character introduced with a "who cares" attitude would eventually turn out to be a serial killer with dozens of bodies crammed in their crawlspace.
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May 16, 2017 04:41
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Bulky Bartokomous posted:Jimmy Kimmel turned Justin Theroux's car into an Emmy-Mobile and it is amazing. Yes it is. 
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May 17, 2017 17:55
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In the Leftovers Universe (I like to call it "The Leftoversverse") everybody is a huge Bungie fan.
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May 21, 2017 02:16
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Given the cold open's focus on Laurie going all in and then changing her mind at the last second, I'm going to hold out hope that wasn't the end of her story. But the odds aren't good. Jesus, what an episode. Shoutouts to Today's Special
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May 22, 2017 03:52
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It's airing. HBO doesn't seem to take holiday weekends off anymore - with streaming and on demand options, people who want to see a show are still going to see it. (I'd say it's because Leftovers is among their lowest-rated shows, but Silicon Valley and Veep are also running next week.)
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May 22, 2017 17:23
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Onomarchus posted:It's not off the table specifically because this show has a certain game plan it has employed in past seasons. Let things get worse and worse (beat you to an emotional pulp) and then end on a happy note where people show up together again. Exactly. The show's propensity for going all in on despair but finishing the season with a modicum of hope is what makes me want to believe that this was a fakeout (Also, when a show leans THAT HARD into a premise, with musical cues and explicit discussions and and and, I've come to expect a swerve at the end with a "clever" about-face.) But no, Kevin's going to go under and find Laurie in the Hotel (or wherever he wakes up this time) for a big, dramatic "Despite being deemed a Messiah, Kevin realizes he can't save everyone" epiphany.
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May 23, 2017 04:11
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TraderStav posted:I must be dense, but I didn't really grasp what the point of that is. What is the significance that the kids didn't have shoes and that no one could find them. It does not make their suffering any worse, only adding another 'mystery' into the mix with what appears to be minimal intrigue. After finding out what actually happened to her kids, their lack of shoes has supplanted "they departed" as the mystery Grace can't have an answer to. Not a significant detail to anyone else, but a question that tortures her in her grief.
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May 24, 2017 18:20
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TraderStav posted:Ah, that makes sense. Everyone in this world has to be suffering. More or less; without everybody suffering and dealing with the constant tumult of the soul in a world gone mad, there's not much of a show. Onomarchus posted:I disagree. It's a litmus test for whether what Kevin does is real. He has to ask them where their shoes are, and only if they are there will Grace believe anything else he says about his contact with her kids in the other world. I thought what Laurie told Nora about why she and John stopped cold-reading Departures applied to Grace: "Death is easy. People just want finality and an end to their grief. But with Departures, there is no end; and if we indicated otherwise, just by saying we could communicate to those individuals, it made their loved ones very, very angry. Because they didn’t want closure." Then I realized that, while that does apply to Grace's transference of obsession with "Where did my children go" to "where did my children's SHOES go," it doesn't jibe with the fact that she drowned the first Police Chief Kevin she could get her hands on after finding a strange man holding a piece of paper that said "Police Chief Kevin could die, speak to the dead, and live again." She JUMPED at the chance to get that confirmation, assured of its divinity in the moment, but then I thought - what would she do if he came back and said "I spoke to them, and it turns out they put them under some rocks," and then they found a pile of rubber and cloth right where Police Chief Kevin told them to look? If Laurie's read on Departure-adjacent mourners holds true, I suspect she may not be willing to accept the mundane resolution that the kids are dead and their shoes were just wearing to tatters in the outback where they left them. So at this point I think I've talked myself into "Grace really is just crazy." JethroMcB fucked around with this message at 01:08 on May 26, 2017 |
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May 25, 2017 03:09
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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. Right, I'm saying that Grace became accustomed to having no closure. She had the glorious uncertainty of having her children Depart ripped away when their bodies were found, so she found a new question to fixate on. Even though she seems to want Kevin to get the answer for her I wonder if she'll be satisfied or willing to accept it if he can deliver it.
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May 25, 2017 12:10
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Bulky Bartokomous posted:It reminds me of Kevin's struggles with the toaster and his shirts. Truly the high points of season 1, maybe only topped by Baby Jesus in the gutter or the lighter that says "DON'T FORGET ME" in case you couldn't piece together the meaning behind the gift. 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.)
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May 25, 2017 13:41
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clown shoes posted:We've come so far since "Rookie Cop." That's exactly what came to mind during that shot - the way her arm was crooked just-so, ostensibly to hold her hair back, made me think "Gotta hold that tube level!"
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May 26, 2017 16:18
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Lost has the edge in score simply because of the sheer volume of it (And Giacchino's got a knack for the kind of bombastic sound that series required.) That said, Leftovers' repeated used of a handful of themes, arranged as needed to meet the mood of the scene, is fantastically effective. Whenever you hear the Departure piano theme creep in you know it's time to steel yourself for an emotional gutpunch. When it comes to non-original music, I'm still blown away by how effective using Verdi's "Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves" nonstop in International Assassin was. Within the same hour it is used as an ominous sting as Kevin tries to grasp his situation, a dramatic intensifier as he realizes the stakes and as a punchline unto itself as everything gets increasingly dreamlike and absurd.
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May 27, 2017 01:59
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UmOk posted:How is this clear? Because Matt watched a lion eat Him.
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May 30, 2017 02:47
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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. Leftovers has always been a little heavy on the "Quick cut to thing you probably remember" (Most egregious in my book: Matt sees the body of the guy who beat him up, broke his hand, stole his car AND credentials to get into Miracle, and the show gives you a flashback to that very event which happened not half an hour ago. Just in case you didn't remember what drove the entire plot of the episode!)
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May 30, 2017 05:21
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HanabaL03 posted:Critics have seen the finale. Screeners were sent out yesterday. Sepinwall has shared his thoughts: https://twitter.com/sepinwall/status/869658113997250560 https://twitter.com/sepinwall/status/869982743928688645
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May 31, 2017 22:05
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joepinetree posted:Kevin Sr. showed Kevin Jr. the body of Australian Sheriff Kevin. He also Sheriff Kevin when the TV in his hotel room turned on and the first thing he heard was something like "BAD NEWS IF YOUR NAME IS KEVIN"
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Jun 1, 2017 16:02
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oliwan posted:Yes, plus season 1 was based on the actual novel, the seasons after that are lindelof. Completely ignoring the fact that Tom Perrotta has been a writer and executive producer, helping break the story arcs for both seasons beyond the source material, yeah, purestrain Lindelof. theflyingexecutive posted:Getting back to normal is a really big part of character development and arguably the main drive for every character on the show; it's insane to skip it. But when the network says "Hey, you're getting cancelled, but we're giving you eight episodes to finish this thing" you don't have the luxury of exploring the journey of that recovery and just have to fast forward to their next great (and final) breaking point.
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Jun 1, 2017 20:01
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The idea of physical spaces being meaningful ran throughout the second season - Jarden being "protected" from Departures, or how Kevin's continued resurrections were possibly a result of being within its limits; the scientists who bought Nora's house because they believed her kitchen would reveal some grand tangible evidence related to the Departure. They were planting seeds: Maybe there really were places on Earth that had a supernatural connection to somewhere else, maybe there really was a cave in Australia where people could be resurrected, or that a man could talk to his son in a place between life and death. But really, it was an excuse to get some beautiful location shots. Klungar posted:When do shows go up in the HBO Go app? Immediately after it airs? Midnight? I think shows are available as soon as they start airing on HBO on the east coast.
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Jun 1, 2017 23:11
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That was such a beautiful way to end the show. I want to see Laurie's prop phone properly, which I believe was the only real nod to "Hey, it's the future" in the episode.
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Jun 5, 2017 05:02
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:So, massacre aside, wouldn't this be the same version of what she told Kevin? I think the one major takeaway from all of these postmortems is that the writers seemed to have pretty definitively come down on a "The 2% lived on in a world where the 98% vanished" explanation. It would be wonderful if the DVD/Blu-Ray release of Season 3 had a standalone short/epilogue, like the final season of Lost's "The New Man in Charge," that let us see what the Sudden Departure looked like from their point of view.
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Jun 5, 2017 19:57
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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. Did you read the big Vulture piece? It sounds like HBO did give them a relatively healthy budget, all things considered (Nora's wig in the finale cost $10k, the LADR machine set was $100k, they built all of Grace's ranch exclusively for the production and had to dismantle it when they were done, etc.) Probably could have saved some if they didn't shoot in Australia, but I think that was worth it for the change of scenery.
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Jun 5, 2017 23:35
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Lord Krangdar posted: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. For a second in that confrontation I thought the nun was going to say "Nah, we just did mouth and hand stuff."
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Jun 6, 2017 03:13
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