Have we ever had the 'what would your ideal ending have been?' discussion here? I feel like we must have, but maybe it's time for a jumping_off refresher.
The ideal ending...hmpfJanuary 10 2008, 12:13:57 UTC
... I think would have been the metaphysical, 'accepting inevitable death' ending. Sam never waking up, but getting a chance - as I *thought* he did in 2.06 or was it 2.07, the ep in which he essentially said goodbye to Maya - to let go of his life properly after having relived some of its central conflicts and issue in 1973 to get some perspective. This would have meshed well with the death theme that ran all through series two.
1973 would have been created by Sam's subconscious to allow him to reconsider his life and eventually make his peace with everything he did wrong (and everything that just *went* wrong) - possibly by some great redemptive act. Even though that great redemptive act would have happened in 1973, it would have been real and meaningful because it would essentially have been Sam deciding to forgive himself. The moment of ultimate acceptance would have been the moment of his death. Fade out. (The audience would be free to imagine that he'd spend eternity with the 1973 crew, and that they in some strange metaphysical way were real.)
The *other* ideal ending would have been the really nasty psycho twist ending - Sam never was a policeman in the first place (or if he was, he was also *something else*) and created the 1973 policeman fantasy to evade some horrible truth about himself. He's actually a psychopathic serial killer and all the cases he worked on in 1973 represented one part of his subconscious trying to 'catch' or stop the other part.
The non-ideal ending that I *expected* and could have lived with would have been Sam returning to 2007 and changing his life there in significant ways due to his 1973 experiences.
Re: The ideal ending...lozenger8January 11 2008, 07:01:11 UTC
Already, your ideal endings and mine don't match up at all. The first one would have made me even more depressed than I was when I realised what 2.08 was really saying. The second could have worked well, but once again, not simply in the last episode, because it wouldn't have been set up enough.
1973 would have been created by Sam's subconscious to allow him to reconsider his life and eventually make his peace with everything he did wrong (and everything that just *went* wrong) - possibly by some great redemptive act. Even though that great redemptive act would have happened in 1973, it would have been real and meaningful because it would essentially have been Sam deciding to forgive himself. The moment of ultimate acceptance would have been the moment of his death. Fade out. (The audience would be free to imagine that he'd spend eternity with the 1973 crew, and that they in some strange metaphysical way were real.)
The *other* ideal ending would have been the really nasty psycho twist ending - Sam never was a policeman in the first place (or if he was, he was also *something else*) and created the 1973 policeman fantasy to evade some horrible truth about himself. He's actually a psychopathic serial killer and all the cases he worked on in 1973 represented one part of his subconscious trying to 'catch' or stop the other part.
The non-ideal ending that I *expected* and could have lived with would have been Sam returning to 2007 and changing his life there in significant ways due to his 1973 experiences.
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