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I still return to this board, and to this thread in particular, after all these years. More & more it strikes me that the beauty of the ending is that every possibility proposed & discussed here over the years can be equally true. And that's the genius of the ending as well. It will never be a film for everyone— especially not for those who are enamored of the current geek culture demand for neatly-tied-in-a-bow "logical" endings where everything must fit tightly—but for those of us who respond powerfully to poetry & imagination, it remains a source of endless delight & always thoughtful musing. Whenever I'm feeling low & dispirited, this is one of the movies that I'll turn to for a reminder of beauty, dreams, hope.
I love this interpretation.
Disagree. His final film, <i>The Dead</i>, is a quiet, emotionally powerful masterpiece.
The original DID suggest the father having sublimated feelings for his daughter. It's not blatant, but it's definitely there. His Ego is so consumed with his intellectual stature & wisdom that he's much more unaware of his own darker side than most people are of theirs. Quite often it's the man who claims to be working solely on logic, reason, and intellect whose unconscious is seething with primal emotion that he consciously denies could ever possibly be aa part of him.
It's unjustly forgotten. Some fine films are, unfortunately.
Absolutely agree!
You shouldn't approach this as a ghost story. It's not supposed to be scary in the sense you mean. It's an exploration of our attitudes to life & death, and how we view the idea of some sort of afterlife. It's a very human & humane story, one that most people can or should be able to relate to as they live their lives over the years & decades. Have you ever had someone you know & love die? Have you wondered why it happened, if there's some deeper meaning, if they're truly gone or whether they might survive after death in some way, or that we need them to survive after death because of the black hole of pain & loss when they're gone? Have you never even remotely wonder5ed about these things? Most people do wonder about them at some time or another. This is a movie for all those who do wonder ... which is the majority of the human race.
TV scripts were much more open to metaphoric, symbolic, philosophical dialogue back then. It didn't necessarily have to sound like everyday speech, and in fact often deliberately went against everyday speech to work on another level than realism. A lot of writers admired & were inspired by the Beats, for example, as well as Theater of the Absurd. Such things are generally out of fashion now, when audiences have been raised to want & need direct, logical dialogue & narrative, with every tiny piece fitting neatly & snugly into place. Which certainly has its place, but not in everything. <i>Route 66</i> works all the better precisely because of its willingness to trust the viewers to feel the poetic dialogue & engage with it rather than be spoon-fed pre-digested literalism.
Exactly.
Agreed!
That's OK. We all mix up things sometimes, especially after having seen so many TV series & so many movies. :)
I like this response very much indeed!
The Robin Hood episode wasn't on the holodeck, though. It's some actual physical place that Q whipped up for his latest little game with Picard.
Agreed. Serling was essentially liberal, but far more so in a humanistic way than in an ideological way, I think. He thought humanity should strive to be better, while recognizing how easily it could embrace hatred & violence - he abhorred materialism & greed but understood to need to have meaningful work & be paid a fair wage for it - and he saw the importance of education, the arts, and science for everyone, while also appreciating the necessity of the practical side of life as well.
Absolutely agree!
Perhaps that's because we're used to feel-good films where every tragedy is overcome in time for the happy ending. But that can sometimes turn into a willful denial of tragedy. Zorba's creed of embracing life means embracing <i>all</i> of it, the rapture <i>and</i> the anguish, because the two are intertwined so deeply & so powerfully that you can't have one without the other. You can't expect to get only the good without the bad as well. And that means accepting both as being inevitable while you're alive.
This is a superb interpretation!
"We are all prisoners here of our own device."
He hits a sacrifice fly because he sacrifices his baseball dreams to become a doctor, not just once in in early life, but a second time to save Karin. And the second time he does know that if he crosses the line that he gives up becoming a baseball player, yet he does so anyway, knowing that what matters most in the end is being a doctor. His single time at bat foreshadows that choice.
At that point in the movie, symbol & metaphor take over. It's not trying to be literally true, but emotionally true.
And quite deliberately so. They're depicting a corrupt world where even the official law is cold & unfeeling, concerned only with power & control. Hammer is the pathetically best sort of "hero" that such a world can offer, out for himself & just as brutal as those he fights. Anyone civilized or educated, even a little, is a victim here, from Christina to Trivago, and even to the villain Soberin - not one a match for the casual, sadistic cruelty of the world that brutalizes & kills them. And that casual, sadistic cruelty includes Hammer.