As far as who or what is deciding which reaper is paired with each reap....even tho the reapers once in a while talk as if reaps can be switched between reapers - the Movie is the latest example, but not the best source for answers on this - there is not even one case in which reapers switch and many in which it's affirmed that some authority above Rube makes the decisions.
For example, it's clearly stated and a pivotal part of the episode and scene in a Fuller episode when George just fails to show up for her reap who dies with his soul trapped and She meets Roxy and Rube at the morgue. There Rube makes it clear only she can remove the soul. If he had any power over the issue it would seem likely he would step in and take care of it. After George removes the soul Rube has Roxy escort the soul while he talks one on one with George communicating that if she refuses to cooperate forces above himself (implied) will just make her go away.
In another S2 episode 'Rite of Passage' George is selected by someone above Rube - that seems pretty clear - to reap a VIP or celebrity. Rube says as does George herself that it's an indication that someone thinks she's doing a good job even tho she's only been reaping for a year.
That the decision as to which reaper goes with which reap is left to the PTB is intriguing on several levels.
One is that as you mentioned no one among the characters - not once - mentions directly the Powers That Be or the supernatural force that sidelined and created them after their deaths. References are always indirect.
And yet the PTB have a central crucial role thru-out the series. The Fuller/producers/writers -somebody - should win an award for creating a character that is never referred to/never says anything/never appears in front of the camera and yet plays such a crucial role in moving everything and everyone in front of the camera.
The key episode telling us a lot about the PTB and revealing the layering in their activities is episode 205 'Hurry' when Rube gets the envelope with the cash that he tried to send to his daughter some 77 years prior. That envelope and his reaction to it forced the audience to reinterpret all the prior S1 and S2 episodes and took the plotting complexity to a whole new level.
The episode is superficially about the efficiency expert coming to Happy Time and there are numerous subplots showing the living and reapers trying to do things quickly. There's a nice visual contrast with all the hustling around compared to Rube's standing in line at the post office for hours apparently to get a package, which turns out to be a letter he tried to send 77 years prior and which the PTB sidelined for all that time before finally giving it back to him.
The PTB - the character we never see - are operating on a timescale and have motivations that we as the living can't understand,and the implications of that are fasinating.
Below are excerpts from commentary on 'Hurry' at this thread that focus on the PTB:
http://www.deadlikememovie.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=57&p= 1546#p1546
It seems the PTB’s time scale of response is a patient one. For reasons not made clear in this episode (or this season for that matter) they sidelined the letter at the post office for all this time and it seems very deliberately now decide to return it to Rube. A message perhaps to Rube that they know what he tried to do and that his attempt to help his family failed. Rube shows not a hint of concern for the former part of the message, but is devastated by the latter fact – that the money never arrived. Importantly we the audience aren’t told why this upsets Rube so much.
That the letter was intercepted, held at the post office for 77 years, and then returned to a different return address without any name to identify Rube implies a lot about the nature of the PTB and the extent to which they are actively managing/intervening in the development of all of the reapers. To this point in our story there have been hints that the PTB do intervene, but this particular example takes it to a whole new level changing the interpretation of every action – past and future in all the episodes - in connection with the reapers taken by the PTB. They are still a distant unseen power, but that they knew he sent the letter, intercepted it, and then returned it to him despite the steps Rube took to distance himself from any obvious connection to himself tells us that there’s really not much if anything about the reapers’ activities that the PTB don’t know about, and therefore, their failure to take immediate direct reaction to transgressions cannot be interpreted as ignorance on their part, but a deliberate choice (whatever the reaper characters themselves believe). And, in this DLM universe and the way the stories are told, we, the audience and the reapers, are kept very much in the dark as to the PTB and their motivations and goings on.
They seem to be manipulating Rube (and by extension all the reapers) toward some personal growth or change allowing him to revisit where he left things with his daughter (if not the wife who died in 1941).
As this story unlayers itself this returning of the letter has a huge impact on Rube, but it was just one factor affecting him. His receiving into his care George, whose early reaper growth has parallels with Rube’s early history, and his day to day contention over her own attempts / temptations to get involved with her struggling family just a short distance away - all this had to awaken within Rube his suppressed / compartmentalized memories of his own struggles / temptations regarding his wife and young daughter- as we see in a later episode his dreams begin to affect his sleep later this season.
By the time the PTB drop the letter back in front of Rube basically telling him 77 years after the fact that he failed to give Lucy/Rosie the cash, which based on his reaction they must have desperately needed, they’re opening him up to a renewed sense of guilt about his not helping his family. The family he probably put into a desperate situation when he used the gun we saw in flashbacks to earn his own wanted poster and probably bringing about his death. In 1927 there was no government social support system. Lucy was a young woman born abroad (Czechoslovakia) and as far as we know was not from Seattle and therefore unlikely to have had her own family’s support to fall back upon. And, it’s very likely that Rube’s death would have placed them in very difficult circumstances – a much higher level of stress than George’s death meant to her family, which given she was a teenager stressed her parents and sister probably contributing to their divorce, but was never life threatening.
That the PTB would force upon Rube a reopening of the guilt he must have put away so many years before is an extremely intriguing development, since up to this point in our story, everything we’ve learned about the PTB is consistent with their wanting reapers to stay away from the living and any interference with fated deaths and surrounding events – their own or anyone else’s. This goes even more so for reapers and their living family members, and yet here the PTB are initiating / provoking a reaction in Rube that seems almost certain to push him towards breaking the rules (as both Penny and Roxy point out later to Rube (and to us the audience) when he takes steps to find and make contact with his daughter before she dies).
What is clear is that the motivations/goals of the PTB are much more complicated than anything in the prior episodes led us to believe and the character development and plotting are operating at a more submerged level than the average story told on TV. This is all the more intriguing because from this episode, which seems to reveal a higher patient benevolent side to the PTB, there is also a step up in showing the dark side of being a reaper working for these same PTB. These darker elements keep popping up as the 2nd season progresses and given how they stand out changing direction from the tone set earlier are likely to be an important background intended for the 3rd season.
The return of the cash filled envelope, as mentioned above, is a signal that the third primary theme is there. If my earlier speculations regarding Reggie being the trigger bringing together a real collision between present day events surrounding George/Reggie and Rube’s experiences with his own family, then the producer/writers of the series had to effect a change of tone during the second season and into the third in order to make the danger faced by (likely) Reggie feel anywhere close to real for the reapers involved (and for the audience).
After Fuller’s departure, there was a bit of drift as Fuller’s replacements – Godchaux and Masius - lightened things up – a lot. But in order to make Reggie and George getting together be perceived by the audience as dangerous the happy talk needs to be dialed way back and the dark side of being a reaper – or in our story’s case being one of the living interacting with / learning about reaper existence - has to be dialed up.
If we take Daisy at her words up to now she’s been having a pretty good time ‘interacting’ with the living at no cost whatsoever. And the challenges we’ve seen post Fuller are mostly of a personal nature – coming to terms with personal inconveniences of being undead, but not much indication that a higher power can react in any dangerous way to transgressions. The last really serious threat happened in a Fuller S1 episode when George neglected to reap her mark and Rube, Roxy, and George all convened at the morgue where Rube clearly laid out a threat to George’s existence if she failed to cooperate with expectations.
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