Nick Wanserski, my answer is also The Wire and for the same reasons as yours. Glad to hear someone else who appreciated it feels the same. You are actually the only person I've ever heard talk about, as you put it, how brutally sad it is, leaving you with such extreme fatalism that once is enough. I've always felt…

Oh, I'm glad someone else is wondering that. I didn't rewind or pause, but it didn't look like we could read anything on that paper, so….

Ha, yeah. Well put.

Yes, but remember how consumed he gets with Daniel, how consumed he's always been, actually? He has that scrapbook of every article about Daniel since the beginning. He feels a connection to Daniel and a kind of survivor's guilt. It did seem like they were going to do more with that. It hasn't disappeared; he's in…

I get preoccupied with whether timelines in stories are possible. Don't remember the numbers anymore, but back in season 1, I figured that it was tight, but possible for Lester to have died and Janet to have married Ted before becoming pregnant with Jared. Doesn't mean it went that way; just that it was possible. …

(And Trey. He's a straight up psychopath.)

Oh, that is interesting. Thank you. Tho, not sure we can say he didn't have a solid inkling of how the first season would unfold. It may have just changed once he was working on the actual thing. Either way, interesting. Glad we did not have to see him in jail again. That feels like it would have been too much. …

"it doesn't help when neither person has a sense of themselves." Yes.

Oh, thank you. I wan't sure if I was getting across what I meant, but it sounds like I may have.

Great piece.

I find the devises in this story hover maddeningly between predictably manipulative and decent, if work-a-day, storytelling. There are repeated sequences of scene cuts designed as mini-cliffhangers that quickly became predictable in their pacing. Likewise with the repeated bird's eye views of the beautiful landscape…

"Last season, John kind of just seemed like the good guy—the good brother, the good husband—who lost his way, getting so caught up in the muck of his Rayburn blood that it eventually pulled him into the darkness." Yes, this is a basic truth. John is never able to do the truly right thing because he is so…

So…cause he's white, he should just stop writing and directing? Or just stop writing about what he knows and try to, say, understand the Black American experience and then get skewered for doing THAT as a white man? This is a spurious complaint.

Well, not everything has to be an awards contender. He's an actor getting good work. That's a lot.

Noel, this is a great great piece. Really, it's among the best FNL pieces I've read and I've read many. Thanks so much for this.

"… just don't set yourself up for heartbreak!" Too late.

Yeah, OK, that's all valid. I was hoping — and thought — this story was going to be about the triumph of the human spirit. Yep, that IS what I want out of stories. Call me whatever, but that is what I want.

Yes, great point. Though speaking more broadly about storytelling — in my eyes, we, the poor audience, have been primed for Daniel being innocent. It's a nuanced priming, but I can't read the cues any other way. So, if he were to turn out to be guilty, for me it would feel like a cheap bait and switch. It's more…

Yes, you are right. But for him to be guilty feels like a slap in the face. Especially with what Trey's said, and with what Daniel said himself in the plea deal scene.

Uh, that would suck. I know McKinnon likes to defy expectations, which is great. Normally. But this, no. This would not be great. Feels like it would be a cheap shot. "Oh, wait, despite everything we've shown you, explicitly and implicitly, he actually did it!"