S02.E12: Sins of the Fathers

[Tabbyclaw]

The dead have come back to revisit the living, forcing Audrey, Nathan, and Duke to confront their ultimate destinies.

 

[BlueJay81]

Overall a good episode, enjoyed it. The Audrey cliff hanger was a surprise for me when I first watched this episode, didn't see it coming at all. I knew that neither Duke nor Nathan would be killed so that cliffhanger was not exciting.

 

Something that still bugs me though is the guy's trouble. I know he had this deep prejudice about the Troubled but surely if grave digging triggered his family Trouble, he should have just switched jobs. In fact the whole family should have figured that out generations ago. Was part of the Trouble a compulsion to dig graves, it didn't seem that way, it just seems so silly and avoidable.

[Elsinore]

I'll always remember this as the longest cliffhanger ever in the history of tv watching.

[Tabbyclaw]

Something that still bugs me though is the guy's trouble. I know he had this deep prejudice about the Troubled but surely if grave digging triggered his family Trouble, he should have just switched jobs. In fact the whole family should have figured that out generations ago. Was part of the Trouble a compulsion to dig graves, it didn't seem that way, it just seems so silly and avoidable.

 

This is a guy who was preparing to participate in mass murder of the Troubled on the orders of a dead man. This is a group that thinks Nathan, whose trouble harms no one but himself, is a dangerous freak. This is not a train that makes frequent stops at Logic Station "So just stop doing that thing" is not an option.

 

To look at the wider picture of what's coming up next,

it's also a lead-in to the recurring theme in Season 3 that you fate will find you no matter what you do.

 

 

I'll always remember this as the longest cliffhanger ever in the history of tv watching.

 

It definitely was for me, given that I'd just picked up the show. Went through the first two seasons in about a month, and then had to wait and wait for the next one. It's also my favorite cliffhanger to date on this show, mostly because of the intensity of the acting in the last scene. (Have I mentioned lately that I love the acting on this show? Because I do. I'm not sure if I've made that clear.)

 

The dead are coming back to settle old scores, and they're using the living to do it. It's so much of what's going on in this show, and I love that they devoted an episode to making it literal. And just in case you weren't completely picking up on the story they're telling, there's that lovely shot of Simon's headstone, showing that he was the same age as Duke when he died. Everything in this town is cyclical, and as Duke points out right now they're only finding temporary fixes.

[MarkHB]

I'll always remember this as the longest cliffhanger ever in the history of tv watching.

Maybe in the history of TV, but those of us who read The Waste Lands (Book 3 of SK's The Dark Tower) when or not long after it came out had to wait several years for the next book and the resolution of a particularly harrowing cliffhanger ("Blaine is a pain!")

[Shanna Marie]

I guess this was a long cliffhanger because that was the year they switched from being a summer series to being a fall series, which meant the season didn't premiere until more than a year after the previous season ended.

 

I loved the return of the Chief, though I still want to strangle him for mishandling the whole situation. He really wasn't paying attention if he was surprised to find that Nathan was in love with Audrey. What did he expect to happen when he threw his shy, socially awkward son together with an attractive woman who actually liked him to work just about 24/7 in a stressful, sometimes dangerous situation? And if it really was because it was too dangerous for her to take risks for him, she threw herself in front of a truck to save him on the day they met, so that horse was already out of the barn. Besides, what father would tell his son that it's bad if someone cares for him? Given the things we later learn, depending on what the Chief knew, there were plenty of reasons for him to be opposed to that relationship for Nathan's sake, but he handled it in just the right way to be guaranteed that Nathan would forge blindly ahead.

 

This was the episode that had a big timeline continuity error in the script within the same episode. It wasn't even a case of them forgetting from season to season but from scene to scene. Duke talks about Simon having died 27 years ago, then later Simon shows him the field and talks about the event 26 years ago and what he did after that event. That's not even getting into the tombstone dates.