- Wolfsheim
- Dec 23, 2003
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"Ah," Ratz had said, at last, "the artiste."
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There's no way this was meant to be a one season show. There's too many cliffhangers like what the hell Elias was doing at the house at night, how the hell Steve was back at school with nobody caring that he was back and somehow not in the military place, and the whole part about if Homer is even a real dude.
Maybe it's not cliffhangers
Maybe it's just bad writing/directing
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Dec 30, 2016 08:56
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May 19, 2024 17:20
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- Wolfsheim
- Dec 23, 2003
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"Ah," Ratz had said, at last, "the artiste."
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I saw this a week ago or so.
I thought the majority of the show was pretty good, but the finale was less successful.
I don't think the issue with the finale was the ideas in it, it's just the execution was off. In that last episode there is a real dissonance between how the characters are feeling about things and how the audience does. The characters go pretty quickly from hardcore believers to doubters, and so does the narrative, but it's not very convincing (there actually isn't really much to back the idea that the story is fake), and so we as an audience are just left in this annoying limbo. Then the shooting thing is ambiguous, it doesn't really resolve the mystery either way for the audience, but the characters appear convinced. So again, the audience is left in this weird limbo and it doesn't really seem intentional.
It's an issue of how to get the audience to buy the beliefs of the characters they're seeing so they go on the same journey, and it didn't do that well in that last episode. Actually, it never did it well, but it didn't matter too much earlier because most of the runtime was spent on the flashbacks.
It reminds me of how annoying it got that Jack on Lost didn't believe in the island's magic even though it was clear the island was magic.
I think this is my problem with it. It obviously can't all be made up because of too many reasons to count, but the tone shifts so abruptly to make that ending work that you're wondering if you missed a few scenes. It felt really forced and made the characters seem like dumb fucks. In that scene where they're trying to corraborate her story all I could think was "sheriff and wife missing new england" "football star homer injury" "football star homer missing" "crazy doctor found dead, torture lab" etc etc
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Dec 31, 2016 02:55
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- Wolfsheim
- Dec 23, 2003
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"Ah," Ratz had said, at last, "the artiste."
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It just seemed like the whole thing was always on shaky ground, the five were always questioning the veracity of her story. Obviously something happened to her in those seven years she was gone but no one really knows what he truth is. We never even really know if she was adopted or not. The one thing we do know is she was raised essentially as a special needs kid, they talk about her one boyfriend who was awkward while in the restaurant.
If it was true about her russian oligarch father then Homer seems to be a stand in for him, when she first meets him and finds out he is a father who only wants to let his kid know he's alive and thinking about them she asks if he is sure he had a son and not a daughter and seems bummed it's a son. All of the other prisoners seem to correspond to different facets of herself in one way or another and originally they were all just essentially voices in her head.
I guess the biggest question that's never left answered is how she got her sight back, unless it really just was a bump on the head. And if the story of her escaping the van was real then maybe the whole thing was her guilt at not being able to save the other kids. She escaped through a broken window after telling the others that they might be able to do the same, she became blind afterwards, was kept behind glass for seven years then eventually got shot through a window at the end.
See, this is what I'm talking about. At least some of it is undeniably true (a blind orphaned Russian girl has visions of the future and regained her eyesight) so it either has to be 100% true or things happened just kinda differently offscreen without any indicator that's the case, which makes it muddled as hell when you get into "well it was probably roughly 39% true" territory.
And if it is 100% true we never see the payoff for the much more interesting plot thread of HAP and the gang so it's unsatisfying that that's just abruptly dropped.
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Jan 7, 2017 22:19
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Dec 30, 2016 08:56
