Tru Calling 4/8 "Two Pair" - Spoilers Below

Cafe Society
1

Nothing in this episode dissuades me from my idea that Jack can also relive days.

I am convinced it was he that made the telephone call to the college girl’s parents and more or less intentionally caused her suicide. I believe Tru heard her ask for help, but Jack “caught” the rewind and lived it fist. Tru’s rewind didn’t start until the murdered man asked for help. So in saving them both, she undid Jack’s work from the previous “day.”

Evidence: Jack’s question to Tru about how much Tru really knows about Davis – during Tru’s rewind day it became “You do not know anything about him, do you?” Jack’s “research” into Davies’ dead wife also suggests inside knowledge - gained when?

He’s an evil leaper, damnit.

  • Rick
2

It appeared to me from the promo for next week that Jack is going to somehow save Tru’s brother from getting shot. I don’t know Jack is evil, necessarily; perhaps he is the Angel of Death, taking lives, but not taking them out of hate. As much as we’d hope every life is saved, sometimes the herd has to be culled.

3

Okay, I taped it last night (haven’t watched it yet, but I’ll just avoid this thread until I do), but my tape ran out sometime in the last ten minutes. Can somebody please give me a recap from about the last commercial to the end? Thanks!

4

yeah, i feel like he’s probably evil too, although i’m still not sure if it’s completely actively evil or somehow passively evil. he also sent the reporter to the cafe in the last ep, after Tru tried to make sure she’d stay out of harm’s way.

but there is the off chance that Tru’s brother might have called her parents, hoping to pave the way for them to all discuss and resolve this rationally, rather than for the daughter to keep running scared. i’m not betting a lot of money on that scenario, though. (ooo, bad pun.)

QUESTION, though: where did whoever get the parents’ phone number to “drop the dime”??? (particularly since she supposedly hadn’t shown up there before, after Tru’s rewind.) and didn’t they show up pretty damn fast after she was brought in for the last time?

agreed, Jack is just TOO smarmy and nosy to be on the side of the angels, as it were. that, and the above, makes me think you may well be on to something. he’s the anti-Tru? suppose he had something to do/knows something about the death of Tru’s mom?

5

Is this how any good? It starts on a channel near me next Tuesday (or is it Wednesday?) I’ve not really heard much about it - I know what it’s about, but is it “must see” stuff?

6

I’m enamored of it. I may not be representative of the TV watching public at large, but the idea of being able to “do over” a day appeals to one of my most dearly-held fantasies (at least, one of my most dearly-held G-rated fantasies).

Nor is it merely a series of one-shot rewind days – there are several story-arcs going on, involving Tru’s family backstory and the mysterious Jack - discussed in the OP.

So I’d recommend it.

  • Rick
7

Yeah, I don’t know about the “evil” part. I’m kind of going on the reaper theory. The girl was supposed to die, one way or another… and that’s why Tru’s timewarp didn’t happen when she asked for help. I don’t think he goes back in time like Tru does, I think he just goes back in time when Tru does, to make sure the job he did gets done.

I think he left his other places of employment because he realized a person like Tru who could do what Tru does wasn’t there… and that’s what he was looking for. So he’d just up and leave, looking for a new place.

Dunno about his suspicion of Davis, though. I can’t explain that.

8

I realize speculation is … well… speculative.

But it seems to me that Tru only gets “asked” when there is a death that needs to be made right.

We learned from “The Longest Day,” that Tru’s day can keep rewinding even after she’s saved the person one way. She saved the convenience store robber killed by the clerk, only to have him kill the clerk on Iteration #2. The clerk then asks for help and starts a previously unprecedented Iteration #3. In that one, she sends a cop in the store to help foil the robbery, and the shoplifting kid who was only a distraction before now runs out into the street and gets killed by a car, causing Iteration #4 when HE asks for help. In Iteration #4, she gets free medicine for the robber’s dying child and averts the need for the robbery, but she’s unable to get it to the kid in time, who dies and asks for help, triggering Iteration #5, which, FINALLY, resolves things “correctly” – the would-be robber is stabbed by a mugger, and is rushed to the hospital, where he is able to donate his heart to his child – an event impossible in I#1 because he was shot through the heart, and impossible in I#s2-4 because he didn’t die.

So as a tentative proposition, I’d say it’s reasonable to assume that Tru is working towards a “meant-to-be” goal. It’s hard for me to imagine another force working in opposition to her efforts is also a “meant-to-be” worker. If Tru is working to make things right, then, almost definitionally, whoever’s working to undo her efforts is working for what’s NOT meant-to-be.

I agree this is supposition. We don’t KNOW. But in the absence of other evidence…

  • Rick
9

Well, yes, all supposition. But we can try to account for all the facts.

The last ep showed us a case we hadn’t seen before: a person asked for help, but that didn’t trigger Tru’s power. Why would this be? That is, was she supposed to die or not?

It seems to me that we learned from “The Longest Day” that if she messes up and causes another death that wasn’t to be, she goes back again. I think we can take this as a given, then, that she will always relive the day until she get’s it right, whatever fate “right” is (though this, to my knowledge, hasn’t actually been demonstrated), even if she re-causes the same death.

So why didn’t Tru go back when the young college woman asked for help? To be sure, she was supposed to die. But not in the way it happened, which is to say, the man wasn’t supposed to kill her (leading to his own suicide). It is hard to believe a benevolent fate wanted her to commit suicide, though.

Assuming Jack caused the young woman’s death, then, we’re left with two options. One is that fate is not benevolent, it just is what it is, and that can be malevolent at times. The other is that Jack himself is not benevolent, and would have killed this girl one way or another. But if that wasn’t aligned with fate, her death in this episode by suicide would have triggered another flashback re: The Longest Day.

So I think it is safe to say, she was supposed to die re: fates, and Jack was the man to get it done. Perhaps he’s even like Tru’s mirror image (see the symbolism in this show, and Davis’s talk), not good, but there to make sure that when people are supposed to die (if that is not already part of Tru’s machinations) then they will, by hook or by crook. In any case, he is an agent of fate just as Tru is, only responsible for fated death, not fated life.

10

Well, just because she asked for help, doesn’t mean she was the one meant to live. They’ve already laid the groundwork that sometimes the person asking for help is asking for someone else.

Example: The episode where the firefighter and the little girl are brought in and the fireman asks for help. Tru is able to go back and save the little girl, but the firefighter dies again, but the day doesn’t start again (like in “The Longest Day”) because the fireman was always meant to die - he wanted help saving the little girl, not help saving his life.

Except perhaps it wasn’t because she caused another death, but the fact that she didn’t save the right person (the little girl). Again - it was the dead man that initially asked for help and he was that again was dead at the end of the episode, but not asking for help.

  1. I don’t believe the man that killed the woman is the man who committed suicide. I believe the killer was the same in both scenarios, only the victim was different. The man committed suicide the first time around because he had lost and didn’t have the money, not out of remorse for killing the college girl.

  2. I’m not sure why she asked for help - maybe she asked for help because she had some thing that was left unresolved? I don’t know. I haven’t worked that one out yet.

11

No, right. But asking for help is what triggers the flashback–when someone is supposed to live. This didn’t happen here, ergo, she was supposed to die. We agree here. But without an agent of death, ie Jack, Tru saving the guy’s life, and her actions (with Harrison as a proxy) saving the girl’s life, would have failed to cause a death that should have been. But since her power is for saving lives, not taking them, she’d be unbalancing things. Still doens’t really account for why or how she asked. Surely she didn’t know she was supposed to die some other way? “Help me die proper”?–I don’t think so.

Actually, yes, you’re right. I don’t know why I sidetracked myself here. Tru is an agent of life. So are we suggesting that if she gets someone else killed that fate is essentially indifferent to, but otherwise saves who she was supposed to, that person couldn’t ask for help, or could ask for help but wouldn’t trigger Tru’s power?

A better analysis than mine. I agree.

I agree that no matter what it is hard to say how she could ask without triggering the power.

12

But, shit, that was essentially the point of The Longest Day, and the fireman ep. Hmm. Maybe at her death she saw that the man committed suicide from losing, and she saw that his problem was greater than hers. Or something. Man that’s a mess any way I look at it.

13

Thanks Rick/Bricker! I’ll make a point of watching on Tuesday (or Wednesday - whichever it is)

<averting eyes from spoilers in this thread>

14

FYI: The firefighter episode is titled, appropriately enough, “Putting Out Fires.”

15

Jack got started on Davis’ dead wife because he snooped on Tru’s computer. She was looking people up after the rewind, and pulled up what she could remember of the picture from Davis’ apartment. When she left, she didn’t close that window down and Jack was shown looking at it.