Investing in everyday things that are a little nicer.

Like better quality candles, pillow cases, toothpaste, toothbrush, tissues, blankets, etc.

Before age 30 I never really put much thought into those things. Now I spend a half hour at a store picking out something mundane like dish soap because I want it to smell nicer snd feel better.

I also like tissue box covers. Because tissue boxes are ugly af and there are some fancy tissue box covers out there. It makes me feel old but damnit I like my sleek tissue box covers it makes my eyes happy.

Juggling. I was obsessed with it in high school, and have gone through phases with it, but it always comes back. I suspect the community has a lot to do with it. It’s full of neurodivergent people and has always made me feel more comfortable than any other space I’ve been in. But yeah, now I’ve been juggling on and off for about 20 years. It’s even my job now!

I wanted to be an actor. It felt like a good fit since I spent so much time analyzing people (and movies) trying to learn how to mask to match them. And the constant deep diving and changing from character to character felt like a great fit for my brain.

I didn’t pursue it because I was afraid my mom would make fun of me. I used to check out acting and theater books from the library and hide them under my bed so she wouldn’t see them. As I got older I buried the dream deeper and deeper and became afraid to show anyone. Eventually it felt so late that I couldn’t try out for plays or anything because I had no experience.

On the plus side I’m now very good at masking, and often get told how unnervingly good I am at adapting to different roles, personalities, and tones depending on the person or situation I’m in. Not quite living the dream, and I don’t think it’s particularly healthy, but I suppose the passion from it has paid off as an adult in many circumstances (especially in work related ones.)

My first therapist fell asleep while I was talking. Literally started lightly snoring. :/

It did wonders for my struggles with self esteem and opening up to people, which is primarily why I started therapy.

This is how I always saw it too. It seems like she’s being facetious, which totally fits her character, especially if she’s thinking about Jack. He brought a level of playfulness to her life, so it always made sense to me that she’d act like “oops! I dropped it teehee” when letting it go. Then she turns serious after that with more remembrance.

Possibly, or she’ll be another mystery that Sugar has to solve, or she’ll be a nice “remember me?” moment for the writers to try to take the audience by surprise. We won’t know until season 2.

Sugar asks Ruby in episode 6 where Charlie is and if she’s okay, to which Ruby responds, “I don’t know.” That’s the last we hear about her disappearance. It feels like it’s trying to imply she was killed (perhaps she became another Pavich victim), but it also feels like it’s intentionally keeping it open ended either for our imaginations to answer or for them to address later on. My guess is it’s trying to make you think she’s dead, but they’ll have her storyline return in season 2.

Correct, but it’s worth noting that a grey VW sedan also drove past suspiciously slow right after Miller had been shot by the police. It looks a lot like the grey sedan that pulls up next to Charlie. I personally assumed they were connected, if only to imply that the Stallings crew was definitely deeply intertwined with the higher-up humans. But who knows! Only season 2 will tell if there’s more to Charlie’s death.

This is one of my least favorite things about people. They always get annoyed at me for questioning their statements. Why even say a fact if you have no interest in whether it’s factual?!

I love researching planes and understanding how they work!

Recently I met a commercial airline pilot at a party and started nerding out asking him questions about it, he then told me I should become a pilot, to which I responded “ Nooooooo I don’t want to fly planes at all I just love them.”

He seemed very confused as to how someone would love to learn about flying planes but not actually want to fly them :P

I feel so seen 🥹

All I want to do at any point in time is info dump to someone about all the patterns I’m noticing in things. It’s the main reason I got obsessed with film, because teenage me thought that would give me the best chance of being able to share pattern observations with other people. Turns out it just annoys people because they don’t actually care about movies or tv that much.

I’ve heard this exact sentence word for word a few times and it always annoys me.

So I have to get pregnant in order to get more “optimal” levels? Because my life on its own isn’t important enough to ensure proper function…

You nailed that prediction perfectly! Well done ☺️

There’s more than one way to fail. That’s literally my point.

And I hate to break it to you, but we’re all debating in depth on the internet behind our keyboards about a show relatively few people have watched. Reddit is the very definition of too invested.

If you’re invested enough to criticize the writing of a show, you should be invested enough to explore other explanations for its mistakes beyond ‘it’s lazy and rushed.’ Especially if you claim to enjoy so many other aspects of the show.

I’m not too invested in this show, you’re too narrow in your opinions and either too insecure or too lazy to even consider expanding them. Ironic how you do the same thing you condemn the writers of doing.

I have, however, been too invested in this thread. I mistakingly thought you might have more complexity to your thoughts than you do. I’ll go invest my time in someone who is capable of seeing beyond their point of view, it’s a lot more interesting.

I tend to agree. I love the alien thing and think they built it up nicely and it’s a great payoff. But I do think it would have been nice to not actually see the alien image. It would have been a nice additional mystery to keep us pondering. Would have made for some fun Reddit discussions about what the aliens look like! :D

I assume they did it the way they did because they were worried some people wouldn’t actually get it. After the blue reveal I had two people asking me if that meant he was an alien, I don’t understand how that would not be 100% clear to someone, but I guess some people need things spelled out more than others.

It’s also possible they were trying to ensure that the reveal felt fully satisfying. Especially since the audience didn’t get to figure out the Olivia mystery, they probably wanted to make sure the audience didn’t feel cheated on the ‘twist’ reveal, so they went all in. They might have worried that not including it would feel too ambiguous and the audience would never get that ‘aha!’ moment. I wouldn’t be surprised if the removal of that scene was discussed tons of times during the editing process.

Like I said, I personally think it would have been more interesting not to have shown it, but I do understand why they did from a practical standpoint.

In fairness, a lot of people didn’t figure out the twist before it was revealed to them, and even many of those who did were still unsure of whether he was an alien, angel, werewolf, or whatever. I also had the theory fairly early on and called it, but I still enjoyed the process of finding clues to figure it out. The ‘heavy foreshadowing’ are the clues the filmmakers left for us to follow, and yeah, we figured it out, that’s the whole point. Some figure it out a little sooner, some not at all, but there IS a reveal and it wasn’t just thrown out of the blue with no evidence. They gave us breadcrumbs to follow and made them pay off. That’s pretty good writing in my opinion, whether or not you feel it should have been harder to figure out or not, they did deliver an interesting mystery that was fun for many to unravel. Certainly more so than a lot of crap that’s attempted to have a twist.

He did fail at the puzzle. He spent 7 episodes trying to figure out where Olivia is, and he didn’t figure it out. He was blindsided by a double cross that he didn’t see coming, which I’m sure he feels a good detective should have seen, and he had to have the answer given to him after he failed to outsmart and escape the bad guys. That’s failure, again and again, in so many ways. And at this point in the story, I’m sure he feels like a pretty shitty detective. That’s a very different character than he was at the beginning of the show. Typical film noirs aren’t known for their intense character growth, their protagonists often end the same as they start. But that’s a lot harder to do in a television show, especially in the 21st century. It’s understandable for writers to make a character weak and incompetent, especially if they started out overly strong and capable, and especially if the story isn’t over yet.

Furthermore, his ultimate goal is to find Olivia and bring her home, which is his last chance for redemption since he’s failed at everything else. And he hasn’t done that yet, that’s the last loose end that the last episode is for. We can assume he found her at the end of this past episode, but we don’t know what state she’s in, or will happen to her from here. He might succeed in this goal, which would provide at least some sense of completion for him, and to my point, provide some completion for his story arc. He ‘had the solution handed to him’, but he still needs to deliver on getting Olivia safe, and I assume that won’t be handed to him.

Look, I’m not saying your criticisms aren’t valid, I agreed they were. I’m just providing an alternative way to look at the writing that maybe explains why it did what it did. Is it perfect? No. Is it the arc you wanted? No. But is it lazy? I really don’t think so. It has taken some deviations from the norm to try to make the story different and perhaps less cookie cutter and obvious. Whether it was a good call is fine to debate, and perhaps you could have written it better, but I still think it deserves more credit than being called sloppy and rushed. And I think assuming it is sloppy and rushed is in itself a sloppy and rushed conclusion.

This show has clearly had more thought and effort put into it so far than a lot of shit on tv, so maybe the writers didn’t just give up half way through and get lazy. Maybe, just maybe, they’re trying some different approaches to make it more interesting and different. There’s plenty of evidence to support that.

Filmmaking is really, really difficult. It’s a complex medium with thousands of moving parts and roles, and it’s so difficult to realistically make work in an ideal way. Money, time restraints, and incompetence definitely often make film worse, but it’s unfair to assume that every mistake is because of that. Haven’t you ever tried to make something with good intentions and had it come out different than you intended?

I’m just saying, mistakes aren’t always the result of malice, laziness, apathy, or greed. Sometimes the puzzle just seemed like it would make a better picture than it actually did once you put it together.

I think this is a legitimate issue, but I think it’s also important to remember the show isn’t over yet. We still have another episode, and how it plays out could definitely change how I feel about the ‘solving’ of the case. Sugar may still solve something else on his own that feels satisfying, and if that happens it could actually be seen as a beautiful circumventing of the story. It’d be really interesting to see a noir where the detective does NOT solve the puzzle (as has happened), where the detective and audience feels defeated by that, and then goes on to solve an even bigger puzzle that redeems his purpose. I personally hope this is what they’re leading to, and it feels like it could go either way, so I guess we’ll see!

It’s also worth considering that part of the fun of a noir is trying to figure out the reveal with the detective, trying to solve the riddle. In Sugar, they presented two riddles; what happened to Olivia and what is happening with Sugar? Right now, it appears they may not be giving us the satisfaction of solving the Olivia puzzle (which is your complaint). BUT they did give us the satisfaction of solving the Sugar puzzle, at least if the audience was paying attention. That’s part of why the reveal of Sugar is so close to the end and didn’t happen earlier, it’s supposed to serve as a satisfying puzzle for the audience to solve as their own detective. That’s job usually solely served by the ‘missing person’ in a typical film noir, but since they have this additional mystery for the audience they may be trying to use that as the satisfying solve rather than the Olivia mystery. Whether or not it actually results in a satisfying feeling for the audience is another thing, but I personally think it’s a really interesting approach and I think it was worth trying on their end.

IF the last episode provides an even further mystery for Sugar to solve on his own, that’d make the additional Sugar puzzle for the audience even better writing. Give Sugar a puzzle, give the audience its own puzzle, solve the audience puzzle, make Sugar fail his puzzle, give Sugar an even better puzzle solve. That’d be pretty neat!

If they don’t do an additional satisfying solve for Sugar, my guess is that they’d be trying to set up a redemption arc for his character in season 2. So they may have him end barely escaping in the last episode, where he feels completely downtrodden and broken (having failed at his job), and lead into season 2 where he has to re-learn how to exist now that he’s a failure at the thing that has been his whole life since he came to earth (which was probably a LONG time ago).

Basically, season 2 would be Sugar learning how to exist when you don’t know what your purpose is in the world. It would be Sugar learning what it actually means to be human.

Hahah 😅 I can neither confirm nor deny I am an alien. But I can confirm that I love obsessing over movies and tv shows and trying to analyze them!

Couldn’t have said it better myself. I’ve tried to explain to a few friends why I think this show is doing such a great job being a modern noir, and you just summed it up perfectly. The editing in particular is so fantastic and unique, while still keeping true to the tone of a film noir. I love it.

Too many people on the internet seem to get off at dumping half of their glasses out and then complaining about it. 🤪

This show is already more interesting and appears to have more thought put into it than most shows I’ve seen with such promotion put behind them.

Whatever the twist is, I think this show earned its value and appreciation already. Hopefully the audience can have an open mind instead of looking for any excuse to be disappointed. The only way it could really lose my respect is to not deliver a twist that connects with the clues at all and leave a bunch of loose ends hanging (cough Lost)

One thing I noticed - obviously it seems Sugar has a keen sense to tell when someone is lying, but Stallings also seems to have this ability. There are a few times he points out when people are lying and being honest, just like Sugar.

I mean, it’s not like it’s hard to tell when the characters are lying, but it could also be a clue that he and Sugar have more in common than meets the eye. Especially if they’re aliens with some sixth sense for truth seeking.

I know this is old but in case anyone sees this now: There is a setting in the start menu that allows you to change the Time Movement setting to ‘relaxed’ instead of ‘normal’ which slows time down a bit. Not a lot, but it definitely made it more enjoyable for me. There’s also a similar setting for Stamina Cost. I was super happy to find these settings :)

I’m with you, he’s definitely an alien. I’m so into it!

Same! It's so nice to be this excited about a show. I only wish more people were into it so we could discuss it more.

I also hope whatever the twist is doesn't piss of fans too much. For me, whatever the twist, the show has already earned my respect and I'm excited to see where it goes.

That's good to hear! I haven't noticed anyone talking about it in the places I've seen, but it seems so likely that it doesn't surprise me others noticed it too.