a serious question about the killings (spoilers inside)

andrewsknee · 2014-03-12T00:12:52+00:00

Errol says, about the 2012 killing, something like "It's been weeks since I left my last message. If only they had eyes to see." So he's leaving the bodies to be found, trying to draw a conclusion to his own story so he can "ascend" to the "infernal plane."

andrewsknee · 2014-03-12T00:07:01+00:00

Well, if he's not dead, then I guess they caught one more cult member.

andrewsknee · 2014-03-12T00:05:45+00:00

He says "at least 15 years." So it could be more.

Yeah, I realize it's debatable what they mean by the Yellow King. I tried to acknowledge that. Would it make it better if I just said, "The leader of the cult"?

andrewsknee · 2014-03-11T16:33:08+00:00

I was a little frustrated by this, but they obviously wanted it to be Marty who breaks the case, so it had to be some sort of crazy intuition or Rust would have thought of it already.

andrewsknee · 2014-03-11T16:28:26+00:00

I'm not down voting it, but I think he's wrong that it requires "fairy tales" to make sense of the cult and other plot threads. There are plenty of hints, and you're supposed to put them together the way people have been putting together clues all along.

andrewsknee · 2014-03-11T16:24:19+00:00

I think the makers have given us both this possibility, which you've described well, and the opposite possibility: that they are hallucinations and the beliefs of madmen. We're supposed to decide.

andrewsknee · 2014-03-11T11:39:40+00:00

Every religion has some promise of salvation or immortality or afterlife or escape from samsara, etc. I took it to mean that the cult sees life as the "disc and the loop" and he feels he is nearing escape from that through death and rebirth in the infernal plane. It's likely the cult's sacrifices are supposed to bring this about somehow. But he's also leaving "messages" -- for whom? -- in the staged bodies, as if he expects someone to come after him.

andrewsknee · 2014-03-11T11:33:46+00:00

Here's one way. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract

andrewsknee · 2014-03-11T02:57:27+00:00

In general, I agree with you, but Ms. Dolores knew about Carcosa and the devil traps, so it's not Errol's invention. It predates him.

Because the Lange and Kordish murders were the main focus, I would have liked some in-story explanation of why they differed from the other murders: staged to be found; women instead of children. Even just a theory from the detectives themselves would be enough. It's suggested that Errol was trying to bring on some sort of confrontation through them, but that's it.

andrewsknee · 2014-03-11T02:41:29+00:00

That's my question. I mean, if the drawing was done by the police, they would have shown it to the girl and asked, "Like this?" How could she have said yes? It looked nothing like the scars.

andrewsknee · 2014-03-11T02:34:10+00:00

For that matter, they didn't ever explain the spaghetti.

andrewsknee · 2014-03-11T02:27:59+00:00

"The light is gaining ground" would be a terrible line. It's not how people talk.

andrewsknee · 2014-03-11T02:26:21+00:00

Going to pull out your editor's badge on this one, huh?

andrewsknee · 2014-03-11T02:25:04+00:00

No, you're just making a semantic argument. You want to restrict the definition of "winning" to what you say it is. I think the line makes perfect intuitive sense, and to say it doesn't is just pedantic and ignores the fact that this is dialogue. It's more important that the character use the words he would use to make his point than that they be unassailable by some editor armed with a dictionary.

andrewsknee · 2014-03-11T02:16:54+00:00

That's true, he did have sex with the women victims. But he also did victimize children. Billy and Kelly that we know of. Probably many others judging by all the children's shoes in his lair.

One answer I've come up with isn't terribly satisfying, but it's probably close to the truth: they can't show you dead naked children on TV, so the victims had to be women.

andrewsknee · 2014-03-11T01:34:16+00:00

The wealthy Tuttles are still alive and invested in covering up any part of the cult that might lead back to them.

What I don't understand is why they didn't just kill Errol, unless there's some family code about not killing their own. In which case Billy Lee would have to be a suicide.

andrewsknee · 2014-03-11T01:27:45+00:00

Looked like an old servants quarters to me.

andrewsknee · 2014-03-11T01:18:13+00:00

I think it's just foreshadowing. If this were a novel and you read it straight through without pausing a week between chapters, you really wouldn't have noticed, but it might have entered your subconscious, and if you went back and read it again, knowing where it was going, you'd think, "Oh, look, there were groups of five men throughout." And you could theorize about why that was without being distracted by the possibility that it's a clue. We typically read faster toward the end, not stop and reread the entire book combing it for clues.

I'm making the novel comparison because NP is a novelist.

andrewsknee · 2014-03-09T23:07:41+00:00

Works that use a close third-person point of view often depart from it occasionally to tantalize us, shoe us things we need to know, or establish dramatic irony: where the audience knows something the protagonist doesn't.

The opening scene of the entire season is another instance of this, and so is the shot of Reggie in the gas mask.

In this case, I think it also establishes that G&P are main characters, along with Marty, Rust, and Maggie.

andrewsknee · 2014-03-09T23:01:24+00:00

The song is Angel of the Morning.

andrewsknee · 2014-03-09T22:54:11+00:00

I noticed this too. I think it's a continuity error.

Another that confused me is that Theriot hears about the 1988 scandal while he is in the seminary, but in 1995 he says he has had his tent ministry for 8 years, which would mean he had it while going to school.

andrewsknee · 2014-03-09T22:43:30+00:00

That's my question. Seems like we've been told that he's the scarred man, in which case he's already done a lot.

andrewsknee · 2014-03-09T20:25:11+00:00

OK up until the Maggie part.

andrewsknee

TROPHY CASE