There are people out there who want to live forever.
You can read about them. Biohackers. Supplement junkies. Entrepreneurs injecting themselves with baby fat. What these folks don’t realize is that this show is meant to last, tops, 3 seasons.
That’s the difference between a great story and a disappointing season finale. One must recognize and embrace the closing of the curtains. You can’t predict your own death, and most storytellers embark without knowing how their tale ends, but the gut will tell you when it’s time to wrap it up.
4th seasons are the worst. The lighting is still impressive, but there’s no intention behind it anymore. The characters begin to do things that lack any semblance of logic or humanity. 4th seasons exist because a story is making money. People who probably don’t get paid enough get ordered by people who are certainly paid too much to sit in a room with cartons of takeout and ask each other questions like, “What if last season was a dream?” or “What if she discovers her mother is actually alive?” But her mother isn’t alive, and last season was not a hallucination. And now you’ve gone and messed with the whole natural order of things.
These are not great times we’re living in. Unless you are one of the multimillion-dollar biohackers I alluded to earlier, shielded from the chaos we’re all enduring, you’re probably feeling that. But we can’t cheat this. We were handed some bad luck. It would’ve been cool to be middle-aged during the era where you could buy a house for the price of a hot dog, but that’s not the hand we were dealt. It would’ve been nice to coast through our 20s with no knowledge that cigarettes are bad, rather than an inundation of internet influencers telling us white rice will kill us.
That ain’t us. We’re living through the storm. The waves are 30 feet high, and there is no sight of the shoreline.
But we’ll get there. Well, we might not. But the generation after us will. And hopefully it’ll be a little easier on them. It’ll be a whole new show. No 4th season. No bringing back the original cast. No biohacking your way into a guest appearance in the reboot. New writers, new showrunner, and fresh-faced stars of a new generation.
We won’t get to watch, but if we do it right, they’ll put our names in the credits.
The value of life lies in its finality, every cliche about living each day like it’s your last, etc.
Side note: would wholeheartedly recommend Sinners, as it’s a very layered movie but there’s a central theme of legacy since it is a vampire movie, and duh, immortality. But also added themes of music and what it means to “sell your soul”. I can’t stop thinking about it personally!
Resonated like a mf. Stuck the landing super well on this one, appreciate how well you've captured things here