Kingdom Hospital's Conclusion, or, What the Hell???

Meh.

When the episode started out with an explanation of what had happened to Mary, I had high hopes. I just ended up irritated and confused.

What the hell WAS Anubis/Antibus, anyway? I remember in one of the first episodes that Mary said that he was “terrible and beautiful” implying that he had some sort of dual nature. But it makes no sense that he would induce Mary to watch the arson, apparently knowing it would cause her death, if he was to lead the others back to “fix” it. Why did he try to induce the criminal to set the painter on fire if he eventually wanted the painter to do him a “solid” later on?The “cliffhanger” was another example of this: if Anubis/Antibus wanted to help these people, why egg on the doctor in his paranoid, delusional hatred of them?

What was he when he was the Vampire Boy? Why was Mary always so afraid of him? Why would he come and pick her up and carry her away while she cried “help me”? Did it have anything to do with Egyptian mythology: e.g, Anubis is the jackal-god of Death?

Why did Anubis try to kill Antibus by dropping a pipe on him in that one episode? Was he trying to “kill” one side of his own nature? What was with the tank that he had to stay in to recharge?

The ending was, well, kind of stupid. If they had gone back to set free the spirits of the children, that would have made sense, but somehow, instead of being in the in-between universe, they travelled back in time and stopped the fire from killing anyone.

I also always thought there’d be an explanation for the dance routines, like being posessed by spirits who yearn to boogie, or something like that.

Are there any answers, or was it meant to be utterly inexplicable?

I haven’t paid a lot of attention to the later episodes (I kind of taped them without watching them, since I really watch them with my dad…since he was in and out of the hospital the last couple of months, somehow we got behind :dubious: ) but I do know there is an explanation about the dance routines- they don’t really happen; they’re just patients’ hallucinations used to show how feaked out they are and how sureal things feel when your life is on the line during a medical emergency.

You mean he didn’t end it with a middle-aged Andy Warhol vampire bursting full-grown from the nurse’s womb?

Tragically, no Andy Warhol vampire-baby. That would have been cool. This was a little… anticlimatic, I suppose.

Anubis/Antibus was supposed to be some sort of gatekeeper for the Kingdom of Death, or something like that. When he was in human form, he was played by the actor who played Paul, the evil vampire boy; they explained this briefly in the second-to-last episode. Mary wants to see the good in all people, but Paul is basically all evil. So when Anubis/Antibus takes human form, he takes Paul’s shape, becoming sort of the “good” version of Paul. They are not, however, the same person.

I was actually hoping that we’d get more of the origins of Paul, and less of the Mary backstory. Was he at one time a human, taken from the ranks of the mill workers to assist the crazy doctor? Or was he always a vampire? Did he start off totally evil, or was he just corrupted by doing his work? They never got into it, and now I guess they never will, which is a total bummer, at least to me.

I think Stephen King’s name being on the production answers that question in the affirmative.