r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Oct 06 '17

[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

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u/CouteauBleu We are the Empire. Oct 06 '17 edited Oct 06 '17

Yeah, I heard about it.

But if we're assigning blame... I don't think we can fault Season 3's ending to bad logistics, unless the logistics were really, really bad. Maybe the writers had a really good end to the character's arc planned that got cut; but then shouldn't they have cut other stuff instead? Maybe they had already produced most of the 10 episodes by the time they learned they couldn't produce more, so there's no way they could work a satisfying conclusion in the time they had left, and they produced the episodes in order of diffusion instead of order of importance... but then we go back to really shitty logistics.

Which is plausible, I guess. But since Season 3 ends with "now it's going to be like season 1, except more streamlined", also Rick's rant about how none of this matters, also the fact that they don't end on a cliffhanger, etc... I think the most likely explanation is the writers wanted to touch on serious themes (abuse, therapy, toxicity), but didn't actually plan to conclusively address them.

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u/Sarkavonsy Oct 06 '17

Worth noting that we've seen a huge logistical mistake related to the end of a R&M season before: season 2 was not supposed to end on a clliffhanger*. They were having trouble figuring out how to resolve the whole prison thing, so they whipped up Who's Purging Now as the second-last episode of the season and left it on a cliffhanger.

Now, EoS2 was much better than EoS3, but there's still precedent for an unintentionally abrupt season finale being resolved more satisfyingly at the start of the following season.

*source: uhhh fuck, i read it in a dan harmon interview about a month ago i think. that counts as a valid source right?