What is a show/movie theory that you came up with?

Cafe Society
261

I envision a movie in which several thugs break into Kevin’s digs and bind/gag him while they furiously toss the place, until one of them finds the photograph from 20 years before of young Kevin holding up the Map. One of them points to a spot on the map, saying, “hey, that’s right here!” just as the indicated hole in the univese opens right under them.

The thugs (who have, of course, dragged Kevin along with them) stumble through history with even less competence than the dwarves before them, always trying to get to a specific event that their boss wants them to change but never quite succeeding in their goal.

262

I haven’t figured out any details yet but the theme song has the lyrics

You want to be where you can see
Our troubles are all the same
You want to be where nobody knows your name

263

Going to watch The David Lightman Chronicles this weekend, my favorite unintentional trilogy. It’s a fascinating psychological examination of a brilliant man who achieved a great thing under stress as a teen, and then slowly devolved psychologically into the most banal of mediocrities.

We first meet David in 1983’s WarGames where David, a cute but nebbish computer nerd with a passion for hacking, discovers a fault in the latest NORAD innovation - a launch-computer named WAPR. A completely normal kid at the beginning of the movie, by the end of it, he is a wreck - emotionally and, not surprisingly, from a national security standpoint.

The stress of saving the world off his shoulders caused a near-psychotic break. The US government, seeing the opportunity, put David into Deep Witness Protection (it’s so deep you’re just hearing about it now, that’s how deep this is), giving him new parents, a new family, an entirely new life, one which matched the new personality of

Ferris Bueller. Still a genius computer hacker, David has completely re-oriented his life to fucking with as many people as he can while getting away with it, his newfound nihilism matching surprisingly well with a “this shit may end any time” knowledge. Wildly successful at this, his greatest con was convincing the nation’s 3rd largest city to wish him well while simultaneously starring as the lead singer in a city parade. Beloved by the sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wasteoids, dweebies, dickheads, all of them thought David… I mean, Ferris… to be a righteous dude.

For societal acceptance, it was the highlight of his life. His college years… not so much. Going to Northwestern, he found himself to be just one smart kid among many. “Oh, you hacked WAPR? Congrats, I hacked IBM and the CIA. How do you think they found out about Aldrich Ames?” This is where things started to really go awry for this brilliant person: as he could not get over the acceptance he felt in high school.

So he went back.

Still paying the debt they owed David, the US Government creates an entire new identity for Ferris - Jim McCalister. Jim is a wunderkind at teaching, getting TOTY honors multiple times, being beloved by his students, helping them through their personal crisis’s - teaching helped make David complete.

But it didn’t erase all his demons, as the person of Tracy Flick - who a resentful David/Ferris/Jim saw as the embodiment of the person HE was to be if it weren’t for the fucking WAPR thing - proved to be his undoing.

The final film, Election, goes into the downfall of David. At the end, he is just a husk of what he could have been, what WAPR… and the US Government (and Sloane, but that’s another movie)… has left him with:

Nothing. Just a man who drives a Vespa.

264

. . .Who then tries to go straight again, in the most anonymous profession he can find: accountant. Unfortunately for him, he gets assigned to go over the books of a Broadway producer named Max Bialystock.

265

… this is how one becomes Walter White, of course. A series of missed opportunities and poor… but not crushing… choices.

266

Just to be that guy, it’s WOPR

267

… the spiral downward continues for poor Dave/Ferris/Jim as he loses his ability to spell …

268

He hits rock bottom when he spends his days writing insane conspiracy theories about himself on obscure web forums.

269

The Man in the High Castle. I’ve only shared this theory with person, but they seemed broadly accepting:

The reason Thomas Smith seems to have an impossibly random genetic disorder (where somehow his uncle, John Smith’s brother, got it but John himself did not, nor did Thomas get the disorder in an alternate timeline with the same mother/father) is because Helen was exposed to radiation from the atomic bomb. As we learn in a flashback scene, Helen was pregnant with Thomas when she saw the mushroom cloud from the DC blast.

So it’s not really a hereditary disorder he has. Rather, it is a genetic defect arising from exposure to radiation in utero that coincidentally shares some similarities to what John’s brother had.

The Third Reich effectively poisoned Thomas as a fetus, and has undoubtedly withheld information about the long term effects of radiation exposure in order to keep the people ignorant of the consequences and it’s culpability, with a consequence of such ignorance being that Thomas is euthanized on the assumption he has a hereditary genetic disorder and John & Helen Smith live in fear for their daughters. The Third Reich killed Thomas in every way possible, and his own father will never fully understand because he is himself a victim of the Nazi machine, even as he is a very active leader in it throughout the series.

Oh, and obviously I disagree with the whole eugenics thing, whether Thomas’ condition was hereditary or not.