sistermagpie

That seems pretty hard to accept. It's been well-established that Kendall is not Logan. Plus, Logan didn't destroy everyone to get to where he was. He built the company at some point, he didn't claw his way to the top of somebody else's.

Exactly. She was one student on a plane full of students who hadn't finished the year yet and we know for a fact that at least some of them brought school supplies and may have also had journals. It's not any kind of stretch. Javi's also using papers from that supply to draw pictures. Since the rescue people knew the girls were about to walk through a crowd of reporters and the plane was waiting for them, they could easily have just taken anything the girls had and put it onto the plane separately so they could go by as easily as possible. The girls had already been cleaned up at that point, so they might have all had a small pack of toilettries or a second sweatsuit and change of underwear.

We've seen her writing in one in the forest and seen one with blood smeared on the pages in the present. She wrote them while things were happening and brought them back with her.

It seems like everything he does and his performance really just says he loses interest and doesn't care what happens to Barry! Which...is surprising. But presumably it must have taken some time to set up that actor and the movie deal...was he setting that up already, or did he do it after he learned about the money? Seems like it must have been afterwards, because that's when Gene became a bad guy who needed testing. Before that he'd been against the movie.

The only way they were able to go after her is if they went animalistic. That's part of how they can do it--much like in Lord of the Flies where they acted similarly. If they were jogging along talking about killing Nat it would be harder, just as it was in the cabin when Shauna couldn't cut her throat even before she was looking her in the eyes. There's a reason they're eventually going to be dressed as animals. This is part of the states Lottie called ecstatic. There's nothing about her currently that suggests she wouldn't be capable of writing journals and even wanting to, off and n. Akilah was studying for the SATs not that long ago. It's not as unexplainable as, say, Misty starting her card offerings with one of the two people closest to her on the right. I like Nat, but I've never been on board with the premise that she's so very morally superior to everybody else. She let Javi drown because she'd rather somebody else die instead of her. Maybe she, too, imagined that she would have wanted her last moment to show she loved the Travis but when the Wilderness offered up somebody else, she took it and told herself she tried. I like her more every time she fails a moral test people have already given her credit for. She made the decision to let him die and now she's living with that.

Roman seemed to think fearing what would happen if your parent died was the same thing as pre-grieving, which it so isn't. Logan was completely himself until the end, manipulating Roman and dangling approval. Forgot that one! Credit where credit is due!

She doesn't really have any right to the information when she wants it, but finding out that these people were concealing things from her just hurts her anyway. Joel's totally in the right here, but he knew Sam and knew it would hurt her and felt guilty. It's hard to really explain why, but I get why for Sam this is a triggering thing. But the show seems to definitely be saying that it's her problem and not anybody else's.

Good point. I hadn't really thought it through. Watching it the first time I was a bit confused tbh!

I don't think it's that big of a deal. The issue wasn't security in that she thought the kids might be killed (though that's possible, I guess) but that it was taking them into a siuation that was upsetting for them regardless, especially Sophie. Logan didn't care about them. They didn't care about Logan. Nobody missed them and Kendall's only thought was to make things harder for them by demanding custody in revenge. She wasn't moving them to another country, just taking them out of the city for a few days. Kendall can easily see them. I wonder if he ever did talk to Sophie about that incident he seemed to find so confusing. I know it's realistic, but I have a hard time getting how these women apparently love the guy. Even people talking about him as a "salty dog" but "a good egg" made it hard for me to fit it to him. Seems like he's genuinely just a bully. I can't even remember him being funny. I wondered if he wasn't wealthy if they'd like him so much and sadly, maybe some of them still would. He'd just be at the bar bullying people. (Maybe this was different when he was younger at least.) But the Women Who Loved Logan's club just seem like a lot of women whose taste in men speaks badly of them. Fun fact, you can build things without promoting fascism!

I really love how the show's making reasonable demands on Sam now. I still love her, and I really completely emphathize with her feelings of being lied to by Holly and Joel, but at the same time I know I probably would have done the same thing. She needs to take responsibility for her own behavior too. It was great that the show gave Tricia a chance to really nail her, saying how she pushes people away. Even her music teacher is trying to so hard and she just can't accept it. Love Tricia in this ep and how it's showing how conditional the "support" of all those acceptable people can be, as opposed to how Sam's friends are behaving, trying to show her compassion and just wanting her for who she is if she'll let them be. Joel's date was so delightful and I'm so happy for him!! But still, I get why he lied.

I figured he really did lose interest in him once he decided he was just a hired killer for Gene.

And why am I still opening them?! I can't remember exactly, but I remember him giving it to him in a bag. At the time I knew what was going on! Yes, remember he asked his friend if his mother also wore hair on top of her hair.

Wow, that was intense! Agreed. Them needing to be there seems kind of absurd. Not only did Logan never show much affection for the kids (he slapped Iverson nce), but Kendall and ATN are a big reason behind the danger. And Kendall's not taking any responsibility for the fear he's caused his own daughter. That was amazing--and even more so because it wasn't a rant they were expecting. Kendall got applause, but of course he did--he was speaking to a cathedral full of rich mostly white people who got rich off Logan. Me too. But it didn't get more perfect for Roman than being just walked over by protestors not bothering to recognize and attack him. He's always been very worm-like Meanwhile, his moment of pain is going viral and mocked. I thought he already proved he didn't have the "verve" Logan did. Nobdy would have been able to interupt and derail a discussin Menken was having with Logan. Kendall's big deal was blown up by...Greg. And then Shiv. And then probably a waiter with hors d'oeuvres.

I thought about that too, so wondered if they wouldn't have to choose again if the Wilderness just said no. Otherwise, why use the whole deck instead of the number of cards there were people?

So Misty drew first and went around the circle to the right starting with Akilah. I watched it again to see Van's reaction. It didn't look fake to me--it reminded me of her reaction when Lottie killed the bear, but not exactly.

Iirc, the audience saw the symbol first, shortly after they crashed, but of the survivors Lottie saw it first. I can't remember exactly when, though.

Yes, Nat specifically said he was "bowing to a symbol tree."

I don't think they meant he was literally too poor to eat. Just that he grew up, it seems, in a more normal way. We know that from the way he keeps getting introduced to looking at things in the rich way and has gotten accustomed to it. On Thanksgiving it wasn't that he didn't have money, it was that he was being ordered around by selfish people whose immediate whim was always too important to let the guy just grab some bread and turkey slices.

So just to be clear, if we're talking about, for instance, The Man with No Eyes, you don't consider the flashbacks that introduced him to be a potential explanation?

Nope, just a fan, maybe Reddit, way of referring to the guy who used to live in the cabin and was found dead in the attic. That was presumably who appeared at Jackie's death. I don't know where the name came from originally. I just heard it and didn't have any other way to refer to the guy anyway, so I've used it. I think they honestly picked their storyline from the start and haven't strayed from it. If they wanted to go full Scooby Doo or WB's Supernatural, I think they'd do it and know they'd be making some people happy regardless. The characters lived through this and 25 years later still think maybe there was something in the woods or maybe it didn't exist--and yet none of them are driven to find the answer about the woods, only themselves. Like in this ep when Lottie was laying out her case for one of them to kill themselves, she projected that interpretation onto everyone else's story after the women themselves all explained their problems differently. And yet nobody on the show's run to the internet or the library to research and find out the symbol is part of some ancient cult that called up a certain Forest God. It's just what they did and why.

Yes, Tai already knew the baby was Jeff's.

MMV, but I don't think any of these things are being set out as mysteries with promises of solutions. Their meaning is the meaning that the characters project onto them. The woods are deep and dark and mysterious and people have been drawing spiritualities from them forever. It's meant, imo, to stay in the space in between a rational explanation and a supernatural one. I think psychic abilities and hauntings may genuine exist in this universe--just as many believe they do in the real world, but the show's had characters explicitly talk about things like how rituals aquire meaning, shown peoples' perceptions making things real, people expressing feelings with symbols taken from the real experiences or facts and distorted. It's always leaving the door open for a real presence on the forest without introducing us to it. A definitive rational or supernatural explanation would completely betray the point imo. (If it was even accepted.) That's the exact opposite of Lost, which over and over explicitly showed that this island had specific properties that were magic/sci-fi that different people had been studying and trying to understand and harness for hundreds of years. Everything on Lost came back to the island--until the writers got caught and tried to pretend it was ever about "the friends they made along the way." YJ started with these women deep into their own forest religion and asked how they came to be that way. Lost asking whether the island's powers came from gods or science fiction still acknowledged they were there. It Chooses had Natalie and Lottie each having different explanations for why their lives were shitty. Lottie was interpeting her own experiences to mean not only that the forest god was real, but that it was demanding a human sacrifice to make their lives get better. Nat thought they just needed to start facing what they did in the forest head on. Shauna, iirc, seemed to suggest that the horrible things they did didn't really happen or else the stuff they believed that made them do it didn't happen. Meanwhile, in the past we have Javi falling through ice, the others choosing not to save him and then Van announcing that The Wilderness had chosen. It's an in between situation where, to quote that book on folk horror I was reading, "The fantastical becomes so absorbed into the real that the two are unnervingly difficult to tell apart." Nothing on the show suggests the postcards are a lingering thing that I can see, but what are the obvious big mysteries they're supposed to be solving? Because I honestly don't see any. For instance, whatever reason Cabin Daddy or whoever had for carving that symbol on the trees doesn't matter at all. What matter is that it was there, and became part of everyone's mental landscape. Of course some things may get more explanation--there may be a concrete identity for Javi's "she" that we learn. But things like Dark Tai and the guy in Jackie's/Shauna's last dream don't seem to require an explanation. Dark Tai is part of Tai. They found a dead guy in the cabin and now Jackie is dying too.

Whatever the writers do outside the show to encourage people to do what they like to enjoy the show doesn't change what's on the show, though, and I don't see what on the show is encouraging me to think of any theories at all. I see other people doing it because they like it, but nothing on the show demands it. There are a lot of times where it intentionally puts me in the pov of characters whose interpretations are subjective and whose minds could be playing tricks on them--so tricking me as a viewer would be counterproductive. That's exactly what I mean. Of course they *could* whip out some unknown person sending the postcards just as Adam could be revealed to be a member of Lottie's cult etc., but from what I saw on the show there's no reason to be coming up with theories about the postcard sender. Everyone on the show assumes the postcards and the text were part of the same blackmail plot, Shauna not getting one was emphasized as a clue about Jeff, so not so far-fetched as people with other theories about it claim it to be. It was never highlighted as an open question after that. Most of the clues that it couldn't be him come from outside the show (and sometimes imagining it was in the show). There is no scene where Shauna talks to Jeff about postcards. She accuses him of blackmailing them and he admits to that. Then in this ep Natalie asks if Jeff sent the postcards and blackmailed them and in the next scene Shauna's explaining why she let them continue to think it was Adam.

Yes, I shouldn't have said it doesn't have them since obviously it does have them mysteries. I meant it in the context of it being, well, Lost and shows like that where the overarching point of the show is some mystery - a puzzlebox show. Because I assumed that's the only thing that would be causing a problem with what the showrunners plan was. The kind of thing that inspires people to make theories and predict people and things being Not What They Seem. Not the kind of mysteries and twists you have on, say, Grantchester where somebody killed the grumpy shopkeeper and it looked like it was the guy having an affair with his wife but then it turned out to be the church organist who seemed so friendly.

It has things that we haven't found out yet, but I don't see where it's a show based around plot twists and mysteries that aren't solved. Weird things happen, but just in a "sometimes weird things happen" way with no explanation promised. Like we might never find out exactly how Javi surived (for a while, RIP) but we got a hidden bunker with signs of life in it. A lot of the things the audience considers mysteries are things the characters already know. When I try to think of plot twists I get things like Adam turning out to not be the blackmailer because it was Jeff, and that was just a straight mystery story where one suspect seemed right but then it was really somebody else. The Travis situation also got a straightforward explanation. For the most part every reveal has been led up to pretty logically, imo, too much so to be a shocking twist. All the complicated theories that insist whatever we've been shown is too simple to be true don't work out. People are probably still clinging to the alleged mystery of who sent the postcard even after we finally, after a whole season, got a reference to them that just doubled down on the original straightforward explanation: Jeff sent them. We're getting things that straightforwardly lead toward the story teaser in the pilot. I avoid showrunner interviews in general since they usually are annoying as hell, but the only thing the show feels like it's trying to have both ways is that is the supernatural vs. rational explanation, but that's the whole idea of the show, so as it should be. It's not a mystery to be solved, it's how humans interpret the world. Javi's "she" isn't necessarily a real person in the concrete sense. Basically: it's trippy, not twisty. Lottie's put that symbol all over the compound and even has people wearing it around their necks, so I don't see why she wouldn't have made the crop circle too.