u/Novel_Quantity3189

I keep seeing posts and comments about her being 'the worst' of Don's affairs (which is a weird way to engage with a show like this, in terms of characters -- none of them are supposed to be paragons of virtue or particularly 'titillating').

But Don's relationships with non-main characters have always served to typify something about Don's character at any given moment. He has the affair with Sylvia as a protracted act of self-injury, and it's meant to be gross and squirmy how Don has "fallen" to the level of sleeping with a married woman who lives near him and with whose husband he has a genuine friendship. Bobbie Barrett was about showing that Don's consistent compartmentalising of his affairs will soon become impossible, and that the women he sleeps with aren't just disappearing into thin air with no agency (it's interesting that she's the first person to let him know of his own 'reputation', and whom Don is the closest to on equal footing with power-wise. It certainly explains why he ends the affair in the midst of a sexual power play).

People complain that the show wastes it's final episodes on a sad mopey waitress but of course that's the point. We want Don to be out there wrapping up his relationships and conflicts with a bow but he chases a ghost across America after literally sleeping with a woman in an alleyway (and paying her for it). His obsession with her makes no sense to us but it also depicts a character whose previous sheen on charisma and desirability is waning -- in just five or ten years Don will be an objectively old man and all of his flirtations will have this air of sadness and desperation. He will be trading on the remnants of his handsomeness and fake affability for the rest of his life; it was a way for the writers show a glimpse into his future. Don will never change inside but the world around him will. Don has no idea he's nearing a series finale and his action reflect that.

If Don is hypothetically alive by 1980, take the discomfort you feel watching him sweatily chase Diana and multiply it by 100. He will be a 50-something man who looks his age if not older seeking the company of the precise kind of women who intrigue him; the few women who will return his affections will be those like Diana who are also broken. Any sense of obligation to his domestic life Don feels in season 7 will be gone as his kids are either independent or in the care of another family, ex-wives dead or bought off.

(If Weiner wasn't essentially persona-non-grata these days I'd be morbidly interested in seeing some sort of one-off sequel which captures the pathetic-ness of a Don in late middle age, but aside from being a cash grab it would also make the entirety of Mad Men much sadder in retrospect.)

So, again, whenever I see things about Diana either being an annoying character or a boring plotline I always wonder how it is that this person would expect the show to wrap up Don?

I realize my thesis stayement here is kind of like saying “water doesn’t make you wet except for when it does”, but I think its notable in Lynch’s case to make this observation — his “style” as a director is so embedded in pop-culture that it’s easy to forget that for a long time, his feature films had largely traditional plot structures, narratives and themes.

Eraserhead as his first and most purest of dream-logic films — riddled with terrifyingly strange imagery -- might be responsible for this reputation. And of course the fine art and short films he made before that were probably even odder, even more free of anything close to ‘narrative‘.

But in quick succession and during his most prolific period Lynch would make use of that early success to direct:

• Dune, which, for all intents and purposes is an attempt to faithfully adapt the novel in under 2 hours. You can see Lynch’s instincts here but it wasn’t anything that precluded it from being traditional hard sci-fi.
• The Elephant Man — again, stylistically unique but utterly engaging for a broad audience. I think the strange but true subject matter sometimes gets confused for a Lynchian touch but Merrick’s story was always going to be odd.
• Blue Velvet - in my opinion this is Lynch’s strongest distillation of his tastes in his film; it follows a traditional noir structure but infused with Lynch’s unique perception of America. The complete lack of orientation to time (when is this movie supposed to be set? Who knows) again contributes to an eerie sense of high strangeness, but it never crosses into the world of dream logic.
• Straight Story - people talk about this as if it’s an outlier of a Lynch film because its plot is so straightforward. But in my opinion its no more or less geared toward general audiences than it’s predecessors.
• Wild At Heart - Again this is Lynch taking a well established crime film form and slightly warping it but it’s never not recognisable.

By that point it’s 1997, and Lynch releases the first and last ever Twin Peaks feature, which is badly received at the time and for all its retrospective value is not high on the list for most people’s favourites of his movies.

It’s not really until the 21st century with Mullholland Drive that Lynch has another wide release that audiences tend to feel a need to ‘decode’ and which completely moves away from a traditional structure (and interestingly it was originally an extended pilot for TV!). Another highlight from his film career, but hardly a representative sample of his style at time of release.

Lost Highway, Inland Empire — this is where Lynch goes full goblin mode. Both are great, and in particular both have famously horror-coded sequences that have entered pop-culture in their own right (Lost Highway’s moment with the old man calling from inside the protagonist’s home, and Dern in Inland Empire being so on Lynch’s wavelength that many scenes featuring her are the closest thing I’ve seen to what a dream actually ‘feels‘ like). But they’re two of eight or nine films, not a majority.

I think perhaps Twin Peaks — which is good, but for me isn’t Lynch at his best by far — entered the pop culture vocabulary so strongly that it got confused for a statement on Lynch’s artistic intentions. It’s noteworthy that it’s one of the few artistic projects he shared writing and directing duties on at different times, not that I’m denying his stamp isn’t all over it; but the demands of network television actually seemed to create a unique situation where Lynch’s stranger instincts were amplified by an episodic structure.

So when people say a movie or show is “Lynchian”, I tend to think they’re actually just saying it reminds them of Twin Peaks, or they give oversized weighting to Lynch’s very earliest or latest works.

But of course Lynch was able to experience the success he did because he smuggled the surrealism he enjoyed into largely digestable pop culture artefacts, at least until he had enough credibility to go hog wild. As a result we have the greatness of Blue Velvet, for instance, a movie that could be enjoyed by grandma for its 1950s aesthetic trappings and sense of mystery and by high-art critics for it’s thematic cohesion and originality.

Not trying to draw any conclusions, just working through a thought process here:

If we assume that the cash found in the sand at the riverbank years later was indeed Cooper's ransom (and it seems very likely it was, as confirmed by authorities), it means that all of the even the 'most likely' theories about Cooper are made complicated. It basically makes drawing any sort of sound deduction about which of the outcomes that befell Cooper are likeliest nearly impossible --

1. Cooper lept from the plane and didn't survive. This in my opinion is the most likely outcome for Cooper. But we have a pretty good sense of where D.B Cooper jumped from the plane and that location doesn't really imply an easy way for (some, not all) of the money to wash up where it did, based on the direction of the river's flow etc. The depositing of the cash here would have had to be entirely unintentional, making it odd that it was discovered still partially 'together' in 3 bundles, not individual notes spread out over a larger area, which would make more sense.
2. Cooper survived the fall but lost the money during the fall. Same issues as above re: having no control over it's landing, and the distance from the drop zone.
3. Cooper survived the landing, kept the money, and stashed it. This brings up the well known issues with this theory, which is that it implies for whatever reason Cooper decided the best place to stash (some of) the money was near a body of water where it would risk degradation or being found. It doesn't make sense as a decision assuming the stasher was motivated to keep or return to the cash. The only possible way this works is that the money was left where it was and was only meant to be kept there for a short while (as in hours or days), but something happened to him in the interim or he lost track of it.
4. Cooper died in the fall but someone else found the money and hid it. This involves many layers of presumptions and the involvement of other unknown parties, and has the same issues as the above re: why would someone who is motivated to keep this money hide it in the worst place possible and never return to it?
5. Some aspect/s of the cash's "discovery" are falsified or a hoax. One could argue that the narrative of a young boy finding the money at this location is false (i.e it came into their possession in some other way but lied for some reason and were never caught out) OR it really was found there but was mistakenly identified as the ransom cash. This is the most difficult explanation to believe because matching serial numbers on the cash seems very hard to mess up, and I imagine the people that discovered it faced a lot of interrogation. Not that the FBI's never been wrong before, so who knows...

No matter what one proposes as the 'theory' of the crime, the cash's discovery is a complicating factor in each one. I know the case is long-cold and there's no longer any official investigation ongoing, but I'd be so curious what the authorities' 'working idea' of what happened was post the cash's discovery or how they incorporated it into their theory of the crime.

The only way these issues are avoided is that either the well-understood 'likely drop zone' for Cooper is dead wrong, by quite a lot, or some aspect of people's understanding of how the cash would flow in the river is wrong (i.e there's some obscure geographic feature that would make the riverbank this cash washed up on hydrologically possible).

Growing up I remember going to my cousin's house to play The Sims 1 because we didn't have a PC at that time. By the time I was 13 in 2007 and I saw this trailer (I wish I knew how I found it -- I wasn't following PC gamer websites or anything) I knew I absolutely needed to buy and play the game. Two decades later The Sims 2 trailer is the first example that comes to mind when I think of advertising that worked on me.

At that time, it meant buying the physical CDs (Sims 2 had to be installed in two discs and it took an agonising several hours), and the town I grew up in (population 3k) just didn't have a store that sold PC games. I somehow convinced my father to drive me like 100 miles to the nearest regional city and back in the same day just to spend a relatively ridiculous amount of money on this game, for what I called a very early Christmas present.

This is such a vivid memory that I can actually recall the moment we stopped at a fast food place on the way home and I was reading the back cover and instructional manual that came with the game fervently.

I haven't played any Sims games since The Sims 3, which perfected everything I loved about 2, but was slightly too big of a game for my computer at the time to handle consistently so I don't have the same nostalgia for it.

(BTW Not soon after all of this happened I convinced Dad to drive me the same 100 miles to buy the University EP of The Sims 2 which I similarly pored over like a crazy person. My dad likely had no idea what The Sims was so I do wonder what he thought was going on).

I'm reflecting on this with the release of the Paralives early access and the comparisons its invited to TS2 and TS3, and I wonder how much of that is just nostalgia for a simpler time. I doubt TS2 was without bugs or lag when I installed it on our ancient computer but I was so in awe of it in comparison to TS1 that I wouldn't have been able to articulate how to improve it.

Watched Hamnet recently. Obviously a big part of the movie is historical fiction Agnes Hathaway and William Shakespeare grieving the death of their son Hamnet's death by plague (not a spoiler). Agnes in particular is depicted as having a very extended and prolonged grieving process, falling basically into a deep depression for what seems to amount to years.

I obviously don't doubt people in the Elizabethan era mourned the deaths of loved ones, especially children, and everyone likely did so differently. But lots of reviews have criticised the movie saying it depicts this grief in a very 'modern' way: in 2026, we would expect a mother who lost a child so traumatically to be essentially emotionally broken for an extended period; but in the 1500s/1600s (at least according to these reviewers) a child dying from illness was so common that society would literally stop functioning if this was close to the norm.

This is something that still comes up regularly in unsolved crime/disappearance podcasts and media, often as a theory for why a person went inexplicably missing. It is always accompanied by vague conjecture that they may have used a drug at least once in their life, or perhaps that the general area they disappeared from 'has a drug problem' (as if there are very many suburban areas or small towns in the US these days that don't have issues with drugs).

I mean violence from the drug trade happens, but it typically happens to people that police are easily able to link to the drug trade. It almost never happens to someone buying street drugs, especially not like a random college kid who maybe bought a gram of weed or an MDMA pill.

Even seasoned addicts who are buying street drugs on the regular are not really all that likely to be murdered completely randomly; drug dealers as a whole don't want to kill the people who pay them large sums of money compelled by addiction.

So the idea that a guy who was last seen going on a hike got murdered and had his body disappeared by a random low-level drug dealer whom he stumbled across on the trail? That is cartoonish, and evidences a lack of perspective on the real world from the creators I hear espouse it.