I think the person who wrote the original pilot didn’t have the whole series mapped out, but the writing staff certainly had a bible and an overall arc for the show, and they never introduced a new mystery without knowing what it was about. The only problem they ran into was during a brief stretch where they were negotiating with the network over how long the show was going to last so they knew at what rate to pace things.
The book never gets into an explanation of what happened, it’s just a conceit to allow for character drama, so I suspect the series will do the same.
There was one clear event, beyond explanation, where 2% of the people go poof. Cool.
But life goes on. In any given year, 1:50 of the people you know indirectly may die anyway in our lives today. It sucks but we cope with it. The fact that this “rapture” seems to have picked people randomly also doesn’t mean there’s going to be any particular societal breakdown. Had it actually picked people according to whoever was the most moral/ethical, we might actually see a societal breakdown if all the truly honest people were to vanish. Society can’t function if everyone is a psychopath.
So the only plausible drama is further supernatural events. We’ve got that cult leader on his ranch. I mentally think of him as “black Jesus reborn”. He appears to have supernatural mind affecting powers of some sort.
He says a bunch of shit is going to go down. Given this book was inspired by the Bible, isn’t there, well, a buncha stuff that’s supposed to happen? I don’t want to see hours of insipid arguments between people, I wanna see demons from Hell teleporting in and people fighting them off with shotguns and stuff.
I take it, from what people are saying in this thread, that this is not going to happen? It’s just gonna be a story about a town of people who can’t move on with their remaining lives.
Admittedly, if people vanished mysteriously, it would make a lot of the things we do seem pointless. Why bother to keep your lungs free of cancer if some supernatural being can decide to make you vanish tomorrow.
The cultists don’t make any sense, though. Who would voluntarily decide to chainsmoke, live in a flophouse, eat gruel, live in silence, and take beatings simply because some annoying people decided to follow you around?
As mentioned upthread, it wasn’t a normal dog. Dogs who witnessed people being raptured (or whatever) lost their minds, reverting to a primal, feral state. There’s apparently packs of these insane dogs roaming the woods.
Which leads me to my next question: Six million Americans disappeared, and not one was caught disappearing on camera? No chance. I’m expecting for disappearance videos to show up on the show, because if something like this happened in the real world there would be thousands upon thousands of disappearance youtube videos. (Remember that 140 million people disappeared worldwide.)
Surely such video could help narrow down the type of cause. (Rapture, falling through a weak spot into another dimension, alien abduction, spontaneous quantum teleportation, etc…)
I’m sure there were many disappearances caught on camera. Jennifer Lopez disappearing off stage in the middle of a concert, many people skypeing or video conferencing and disappearing, countless security camera videos with people disappearing.
I’m sure in the show’s universe, that those videos were played endlessly on TV and were all the top Youtube videos for months after the disappearances. But three years after the disappearance, a lot of people are resigned to not knowing what the cause is, and there’s no reason to be showing those videos over and over again on TV. And no reason for any of the characters to be watching them on their computers.
How would the video help? The show hasn’t shown it directly, but as near as I can tell, one frame a person is there and the next frame, they aren’t. No sound, no light, nothing. If a person disappears mid-frame with a modern digital camera, you’d a sort of half transparent image of the person that frame. (has nothing to do with the mechanism of disappearance, just the way the camera calculates the image)
We know that they clothes they are wearing go with them but not shopping carts that they are pushing. It looks like the things in their pockets go along too but that’s not clear.
I’ve read the book (fairly recently, in anticipation of the show), and as has been mentioned up thread, the reason for the disappearance is not resolved. The book is not plot-driven; it’s an exploration of people’s reactions to the inexplicable happening. If there is ever an explanation offered in the show, I would very much doubt it’s going to be some sort of action-packed alien invasion. It isn’t that sort of story.
That said, according to this article, Lindelof has promised that the show “won’t end like ‘Lost’,” although It’s unclear to me from the article exactly what he means by that:
I like it so far, and the “departure” doesn’t need to be explained for it to be good storytelling.
Last night’s episode was really good, I was really pulling for the pastor to make it to the bank on time, even though I knew he wouldn’t
Right now, I hate the GR and their vow of silence, the cigarettes are a nice touch. You just want to punch them when they are doing their stalker routine.
I wonder if the writers are going to try and make us like them at some point?
I love hating them, so if they will be able to pull off empathizing with them, it will be miraculous.
The Frost twins and their Prius are kind of funny, I hope to see more of them.
I can’t see Holy Wayne being anything but a villain.
[spoiler] Nothing happens. It begins with the guy in danger of losing his church. In the end, he’s lost the church. Somehow, the “international consortium” that bought the church for only $135K became the chainsmoking cult. I was more interested in how that happened (as well as why the church was worth so little).
I wanted more exploration of why this guy thinks it is his mission to expose the failings of the disappeared. I guess that was his sister he visited asking for money. He drops the bomb on her about her husband’s philandering, but says that is a story he would never publish. Why is he sympathetic to her feelings and privacy, but doesn’t care about anyone else’s? What an asshole. [/spoiler]
I knew only a little about the book, but never read it. Saw the HBO ads and decided to watch the first episode. Meh. Haven’t gone back. If people here love love love it by the time it’s done, maybe I’ll catch it someday on DVD.
It was great! Perhaps you are being a bit one dimensional in your analysis?
He was convinced that he was being led to a solution to save his church by the pigeons, but it meant nothing. That’s classic! Great stuff if you ask me. It asks the question, are we all delusional?
I see that as analogous to his efforts to expose the shortcomings of the departed; he doesn’t want it to have been the rapture, because that would mean his life as a pastor would have been a failure. He is in denial, or just as confused and lost as ever. He keeps silent about his brother-in-law for the sake of his sister. Understandable, perhaps hypocritical, but understandable.
The GR being linked to a larger organization and buying up property is likely a hint of things to come.
I thought 135k was a bit low, but I’m not going to trash the series because of that. What if property values dropped in that town?
I’m un-spoilering part of Drum God’s post, but neither it nor my response “spoil” anything. (Besides, isn’t the general rule of thumb that information from episodes that have aired in the US doesn’t have to be spoilered…?)
I thought he made it clear in the casino: he doesn’t want people to remember/think of the disappeared as one big group of innocent victims. He thinks it’s important to separate the truly “innocent” victims – like casino guy’s niece – from the disappeared who were crappy people.
Something I didn’t pick up on in the third episode but learned from the AV Club writeup is regarding the story he told in church about the boy who prayed for more attention only to get leukemia. That was him, and the sister was the one he met and asked for money. (Also the sister is the one in the earlier episodes who is something of a celebrity in town because her husband and children all disappeared on that day.) And the police chief’s father was a judge who was taking bribes, so when the police chief went to visit him in the second episode, that was in a prison or a prison hospital.
So they’re filling in details about the people in the town and their relationships.
In the show, it’s been three years since the event. Would people really still be as fucked up as they’re portraying on the show? Almost no one seems to living an ordinary life. If that’s how people are behaving world-wide, how does society continue to function?
I suppose it’s not just the disappearance but also that it’s unexplained, like when will it happen again, will it include me, or my kids …
Obv. people are still joining the cults, people like the preacher has his wife to care for - I guess society has an awful lot of one-parent families, bereaved parents, etc.
