3x03, "Always Crashing In The Same Car"

[jimsmyth]

So no idea whether or not he was escalating or even how many girls he killed, but it sounds like he was a serial killer to me. I think that's part of why she flipped so completely, it wasn't just that she walked in on him doing something horrible but she figured out he had done it before repeatedly and she'd known nothing about it (or did she....?).

incidentally, just like Danny with Andre.

Oooh.

Ick.

[Elizabeth Bear]

So no idea whether or not he was escalating or even how many girls he killed, but it sounds like he was a serial killer to me. I think that's part of why she flipped so completely, it wasn't just that she walked in on him doing something horrible but she figured out he had done it before repeatedly and she'd known nothing about it (or did she....?).

incidentally, just like Danny with Andre.

Oooh.

Ick.

Gold star. *g*

[jimsmyth]

So no idea whether or not he was escalating or even how many girls he killed, but it sounds like he was a serial killer to me. I think that's part of why she flipped so completely, it wasn't just that she walked in on him doing something horrible but she figured out he had done it before repeatedly and she'd known nothing about it (or did she....?).

incidentally, just like Danny with Andre.

Oooh.

Ick.

Gold star. *g*

I'm hoping that for eschatonic, catching a nifty bit of (disturbing) parallelism, rather than me, quoting a Danger Mouse character.

[Elizabeth Bear]

I had hoped the context was obvious. *g*

(Although Dangermouse always gets a gold star from me.)

[HebrewRose]

Well, all I can say is that I'm very glad I didn't go ahead and read this at midnight last night, and decided to sleep first instead.

(from the extra) "Christ in a gocart, it's all of us." So true.

Gets my points for most horror-genre episode... also, just one act? Crazy...

*is incoherent*

Brilliant, thank you.

[Bibliophile]

also, just one act? Crazy...

I kind of think of each letter as a separate act, with the non-letter ending as Act V. Maybe.
Also, I think that the Danny/Andre and Betty/Tom similarity gets at the crucial point, that was also indicated by the extra "Confessions". Why do two people (Betty and Danny) finding themselves in the same/very similar situations, not both crack? Someday, maybe, we'll find an answer. Or maybe there isn't one, and it's just chance.
...
On an unrelated note, 12/25 of the quotes in the s3 promo have already occurred.

[tylik]

"Christ in a gocart, it's all of us."

And such a mark of maturity to see that.

[Elizabeth Bear]

also, just one act? Crazy...

I kind of think of each letter as a separate act, with the non-letter ending as Act V. Maybe.

It's super-ultra-condensed Shadow Unit. You only need a dab.

[Scedasticity]

I haven't been around for a bit, so I read this thread through from the beginning, and

You don't suppose that "Always Crashing In The Same Car" might possibly be set in, say, July of 2009? And that it involves Bad Shit Happening?  And that, perhaps, Chaz had a near-death experience that left him thinking "Jesus fuck, I'm so happy not to be dead?

I'm wondering if what got him back online was maybe talking to Dice...

[jennygadget]

Aside from the extra ickiness of the ep, one of the things that really stood out for me was how much this would not have worked as a season 1 - or even really a season 2 - ep.

There's just not a whole lot of text there.  And by that I don't mean "oh noes! only one act!" - I mean that we're never told, for example, what it must feel like for Brady to pull a gun on a loved one/family/partner yet again - we're not even reminded of that, really.  The expectation is that we already know and remember and can therefore infer all the stuff that fills in the gaps.

Which I think is pretty cool.

And fits in really well with the whole idea of interactive fiction, as not everyone will fill in the gaps the same way.  (Including fans disagreeing with characters - Brady says that he did not fight, but I disagree bc he clearly worked really hard to make sure that Daphne wasn't shot, despite not being completely in control of himself.)

Also - woohoo for Danny finally making that call!

[Edmund Schweppe]

You don't suppose that "Always Crashing In The Same Car" might possibly be set in, say, July of 2009? And that it involves Bad Shit Happening?  And that, perhaps, Chaz had a near-death experience that left him thinking "Jesus fuck, I'm so happy not to be dead?

I'm wondering if what got him back online was maybe talking to Dice...

I think you're right.

[HebrewRose]

I was having very similar thoughts... I've been trying to get friends to read SU, and a couple have asked if they need to start at the beginning or if they can just read the latest episode and go from there. After this one I thought right away that the latter would *not* work.

Okay, I don't get why everyone else is saying, "I didn't figure out who the gamma was..."

I started reading her description of her childhood, and went...oooh, crackalicious!

I believe that was the point when I still didn't know if the gamma was Tom, Betty, or both, and I was sort of keeping score: one crack for Betty, two for Tom, three for Betty...

Um, I deleted something about the timeline of the letters from your quote before I realized I also wanted to reply to that. Were all the letters written from Idlewood, or just the last couple? It feels like it would have to be all of them, but then why does she still seem unaware of the investigation in the first one? By the third one, she says something about false arrest, but in the first, she seems to be still living with Tom, or thinks she is (?).

[Edmund Schweppe]

Edmund, ask me after the story comes out why I'm grateful for your post.

Now I'm not quite sure I'm grateful for my post. You see, my father died on July 8, 1988 in a car crash, having been born in Minnesota and later moved to the desert ...

Of course, the parallels end there. My father's name was Fred Schweppe, not Tom Johnson. The desert he moved to (as a child) was Tuscon, not the Mojave. He died in Massachusetts, not "within four hundred miles of the Twin Cities." According to the autopsy, his death was due to a heart attack which caused him to lose control of the car he was driving, not the car crash itself. The car he was driving wasn't a Mustang.

But given how often we proclaim that we don't believe in coincidence, the fact that all the Tom Johnsons in the story died on July 8 gave me some seriously complex ECR.

[Edmund Schweppe]

That's two gammas in a row named Johnson that Danny's had to deal with. (Remember Gerald Johnson from "Basilisk Hunt"?)

That's also two gammas (Betty Johnson and Roger Weathers aka Mr. Friendly) from the Twin Cities. For the sake of 4th Street,  I hope that's that thing we don't believe in.

Oh, and what was Roger Weathers' wife's name? Betty.

[Felicia1066]

My thought was actually that the original Tom was responsible for them, or at the very least, was responsible for the fire. 

Hunh, I thought Tom was responsible for the haying and drowning accidents at least - she says she met him when she was 17, and he was 5 years older, and his father died when he was 15 and his mother and younger brother when he was 18. She would've only been 13 then and it didn't sound like she knew him at all. I figured he picked on her because she was young and insecure and they _were_ going to get cut out of the will when they married, and he wanted the money from selling the store. She also said 'Pastor Bob thought it was too soon after my family's death' so it sounds like the whole family got wiped out ('My sisters and I had a lovely childhood. We always knew we were very blessed, right up to the night of the fire', 'If not for the fire, my family would've come to love Tom as much as I do' - I have to think if someone survived she'd mention them specifically).

What I started wondering about was her complicity. Stuff like 'It was obvious he needed some time by himself' and 'I put my hands on the steering wheel like Tom taught me'...........

I pegged him as definitely responsible for the haying accident and the fire, and possibly the drowning as well. (The letters don't give us any specific reason why Tom the First would want to kill his mother and brother, but...)

As far as complicity... I picture him as not being the most pleasant man to live with, but it was always much easier when he got back from a hunting trip. So Betty encouraged him to go away, and didn't want to think about it too much. Then, when she saw him with that girl - and did she realize it all then? Was the girl already dead, or was it mid-rape and all she saw was him cheating on her? - when she eventually put it all together, and realized that she'd told him to go out, and every time he did someone died... Yeah, that's some crack. Combine it with a traumatic loss of her only child ever...