Confused about Season 2?Or anything else?...me too! Doesn't anyone have any answers???

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Originally posted by Executor So you end it on a cliffhanger, you don't just flip out with a "BLAAGH! EVERYTHING DISAPPEARS!" ending.

at least the rewind leaves a loophole for a season 3 X.x

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Originally posted by Executor So you end it on a cliffhanger, you don't just flip out with a "BLAAGH! EVERYTHING DISAPPEARS!" ending.

No no you got it all wrong. Roger was a robot and everyone was a big hologram and it was a tv show.... THE END. Thats why there can't be a thrid season.

Sarcasm, but also echoing the beliefs of members of the AS forums.

I have to admit, I wonder what would have happened if the show continued on the direction it was going before Ep. 25, before they revealed the superdome and stages and control rooms and Angel's 'true nature'. What if the "Union war planes" really were Union war planes instead of Stagelights? What if they actually had the Union story come to a better end then revealing the Union were just outcast tomatos? What if they actually made the Big O/Big Fau fight come to a real conclusion, or even if they made it so the fight actually mattered in the long run? What if they actually showed what happened 40 years ago and what led up to those events? Would this have made a better end to the show then the surreal and almost entirely symbolic ending we got? Would we have enjoyed this more then magic books and disappearing elevators and an ending where everything disappears into a huge grid?

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Originally posted by MetalGoldKnight I have to admit, I wonder what would have happened if the show continued on the direction it was going before Ep. 25, before they revealed the superdome and stages and control rooms and Angel's 'true nature'. What if the "Union war planes" really were Union war planes instead of Stagelights? What if they actually had the Union story come to a better end then revealing the Union were just outcast tomatos? What if they actually made the Big O/Big Fau fight come to a real conclusion, or even if they made it so the fight actually mattered in the long run? What if they actually showed what happened 40 years ago and what led up to those events? Would this have made a better end to the show then the surreal and almost entirely symbolic ending we got? Would we have enjoyed this more then magic books and disappearing elevators and an ending where everything disappears into a huge grid?

Id say season 3 could be an alternate season 2... or maybe an alternate season 1 since they rewound all the way to the beginning O.o

Maybe all the shoulda woulda and couldas will be answered there.

A comment..
Isn't big O like the matrix? only dorothy with no cool glasses.....

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Originally posted by BigO-SHOWTIME Id say season 3 could be an alternate season 2... or maybe an alternate season 1 since they rewound all the way to the beginning O.o

I don't understand why anyone believes that. I mean, the sequence at the end included this picture:



Please explain how Roger is going to ransom Dorothy from the warehouse in Act 1 if he just drove past her. She's supposed to be bound and blindfolded in Beck's car!

This doesn't look like a repeat of Act 1 to me.

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Originally posted by A Clockwork Tomato quote: Originally posted by BigO-SHOWTIME Id say season 3 could be an alternate season 2... or maybe an alternate season 1 since they rewound all the way to the beginning O.o I don't understand why anyone believes that. I mean, the sequence at the end included this picture: Please explain how Roger is going to ransom Dorothy from the warehouse in Act 1 if he just drove past her. She's supposed to be bound and blindfolded in Beck's car! This doesn't look like a repeat of Act 1 to me.

thats why its an "alternate" season 1.

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Originally posted by BigO-SHOWTIME thats why its an "alternate" season 1.

Why season 1? Why not an alternate season 2 or season 27? The choice strikes me as being almost completely random.

Im saying season 1 TIME. it got rewound to the TIME roger drives past the traffic light. Id say alternate season 2 if she rewound to the time the foreign megadeus fight was. Season 1 in turms of the TIMELINE of the show not the exact events.

I don't think it was brought back to season 1. I think that each previous loop ended with everything going all to hell somehow. One of them had a Leviathan war, one of them had the other Bigs going nuts, et cetera. Each time it started falling apart, Big Venus showed up and didn't rewind time at all, but "paused" it, fixed the city, and then erased everybody's memory, shuffling some peoples' memories around. Gordon then started trying to change the will of the Director for the sake of the people by creating the tomato children, an experiment which ultimately went wrong. Roger was created to negotiate with the Director to stop peoples' memories from being erased. In the last loop he was unsuccessful because he never got off the seafloor, as we see in Roger's flashback. This time, though, he was able to negotiate with Angel, and convinced her to repair the city without erasing peoples' memories.

Edit: Yeah, traffic light, plate in the road, I know. Roger drove over that more than once, and he went through the "I am a negotiator" speech a bunch of times, too. So it's not set in stone that it went back to Act 1.

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Originally posted by GAT-X105 I don't think it was brought back to season 1. I think that each previous loop ended with everything going all to hell somehow. One of them had a Leviathan war, one of them had the other Bigs going nuts, et cetera. Each time it started falling apart, Big Venus showed up and didn't rewind time at all, but "paused" it, fixed the city, and then erased everybody's memory, shuffling some peoples' memories around. Gordon then started trying to change the will of the Director for the sake of the people by creating the tomato children, an experiment which ultimately went wrong. Roger was created to negotiate with the Director to stop peoples' memories from being erased. In the last loop he was unsuccessful because he never got off the seafloor, as we see in Roger's flashback. This time, though, he was able to negotiate with Angel, and convinced her to repair the city without erasing peoples' memories. Edit: Yeah, traffic light, plate in the road, I know. Roger drove over that more than once, and he went through the "I am a negotiator" speech a bunch of times, too. So it's not set in stone that it went back to Act 1.

However he only introduced himself once in the entire story while driving over that spot... act 1. Whatever you know what i mean. I am not overanalyzing it.

I just watched the first episode of Season 2 tonight. It was markedly different in storytelling style from Season 1 and was a little bizzare - but I love these characters. I kind of lost my enthusiasm waiting for *if* Season 2 was going to happen and then I was never home when the new season came on.

I'm way late in the game, so this post probably won't get read. Being the spoilerpuss I am, I found this board by desperately searching for comments about Season 2 and I've read lots of comments on the finale. Cool board. Where were you guys all my Big O life?

Given all of the speculation, several things come to mind. The first is that Season 1 was a paradigm, controlled by Gordon Rosewater, but one paradigm can be substituted for another and Roger made that possible by unleashing the memories in the first episode of Season 2. That's why controlling the memories was so important, because it's a form of group-consciousness and why Roger's role as a Negotiator is so important in the end.

The second season seems to be certain characters fighting over which paradigm will rule, because the memories are now free. It's about fighting for one's perspective - and Roger represents freedom from the past, Angel the status-quo. And because of that, the perspective can constantly change depending on who is controlling the paradigm since it's in flux due to the memories - it's experiencing lots of possible realities all at once. But nothing is real; it's all dependent on a single perspective to stabilize it.

It's an interesting metaphysical concept, but good storytelling it does not make unless it's done very carefully. I don't thing that's the case here.

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Originally posted by BigO-SHOWTIME However he only introduced himself once in the entire story while driving over that spot... act 1. Whatever you know what i mean. I am not overanalyzing it.

It's a voiceover. Voiceovers aren't real from the characters' perspective, any more than they can see the credits or hear the background music.

Roger does very similar voiceovers in several episodes, anyway, and he drives over that damned metal plate in the road innumerable times -- in R-D, for instance.

Having an ending that's pretty much the same as the beginning is a traditional way of ending a story with the message, "Things have gotten back to normal."

If they wanted to establish a loop, all they had to do was eliminate the shot with Angel and Dorothy and continue the scene to the abandoned warehouse. They didn't do this because there wasn't a loop.

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from superninja: It's an interesting metaphysical concept, but good storytelling it does not make unless it's done very carefully. I don't thing that's the case here.

I like you already, superninja.

I'm to the point that I'm hoping that this was a bad dream, and Roger is still unconsciously seated in the cockpit of Big O while being dragged down the street by Alex/Big Fau, and Dorothy is about to wake up, run to the roof railing, jump on it, and yell:
"Rooooooooo-geeeeeerrrrrrrr!!!", where we are then treated to something that I can really sink my teeth into.

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from superninja: It's an interesting metaphysical concept, but good storytelling it does not make unless it's done very carefully. I don't thing that's the case here.

Narrative fiction isn't about the setting; it's about the characters. It's not about what happens off-screen; it's about what happens on-screen. It's not about what happens in dreams and visions; it's about what happens in waking life. It's not about what happens before the characters appear or after they're gone; it's about what happens to them here and now.

The story is about Roger Smith and his life, and the lives of those he cares about, particularly Dorothy and Angel. Paradigm City is the SETTING. The mysteries are the SETTING. We will learn about them at about the same rate that Roger Smith does. The show's about HIM. The setting is important, but the show's about Roger Smith. OUR Roger Smith; not some vague series of putative past and future Roger Smiths.

The mysteries are fascinating and intriguing and are loaded with lots of apparent (though I suspect superficial) symbolism, and it's easy to be distracted by them. But the show's still about Roger Smith, Dorothy, and Angel -- and to a lesser extent Dastun and Norman.

Just put a question mark after everything you don't understand; Roger doesn't understand much of it, either, but he doesn't let this stop him. We shouldn't let it stop us. We'll find out when he does.

Yeah, whatever. I'm all for YZEtc's "all a dream" idea. At least it makes SENSE.

Oh, there could be a season three . . . I earlier posted this theory, after watching "Roger the Wanderer" last night--

http://www.paradigm-city.com/forums/thre...eadid=2992&sid=

I think this ep is the key, sad as that makes the whole show . . .

Thank you, Executor.

*gives high-five*

About the open-endedness of the ending, here's the big problem:
We see Dorothy and Angel "fighting" for Roger's affections througout the show. Everything goes ga-ga, and we see them standing together watching him drive by. I can say that the whole purpose of the show was one big reality TV series where Dorothy and Angel compete to see who gets Roger-Who wants to marry a Negotiator. Ridiculous, I know. But the way the ending is, there is not a single iota of evidence to prove that theory wrong. The ending need not reveal everything, but it should have at the very least narrowed the possibilities. As of right now, we have countless theories of what happened, and not a single person can argue with proof that any one is wrong.

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Originally posted by OMGWTF About the open-endedness of the ending, here's the big problem: We see Dorothy and Angel "fighting" for Roger's affections througout the show. Everything goes ga-ga, and we see them standing together watching him drive by. I can say that the whole purpose of the show was one big reality TV series where Dorothy and Angel compete to see who gets Roger-Who wants to marry a Negotiator. Ridiculous, I know. But the way the ending is, there is not a single iota of evidence to prove that theory wrong.

But that part of the show was resolved in STRIPES, wasn't it? The whole question was dead after the scene with Angel and Roger on the beach.

Some of the "big questions" in the show changed over time. Until THE UNDERGROUND TERROR, it was, "Will Roger recognize that Dorothy is a real person with feelings?" Until BECK COMES BACK, it was, "Will Roger ever recognize Dorothy's love for him?"

spoiler (highlight to read):

Until STRIPES, it was, "Does Roger love Dorothy?" Until THE SHOW MUST GO ON, it was, "Will Roger ever acknowledge his love for Dorothy?" All of these were resolved. There were other, similar questions that changed over time, about other things.

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The ending need not reveal everything, but it should have at the very least narrowed the possibilities. As of right now, we have countless theories of what happened, and not a single person can argue with proof that any one is wrong.

People can't even agree about what constitutes "evidence," let alone "proof." You can't expect a consensus under such circumstances.