The show takes an outlandish premise (a closet that is a gateway to 1960 USA… maybe it’s the closet they shot Doctor Who in during the 1960’s… and a mission to prevent the assassination of JFK) and treats it in an extremely grounded fashion. Apparently this book involved the most research Stephen King has ever done. All the details feel right, right down to the price of a piece of pie. The show dives deep into all kinds of JFK assassination conspiracy theories, and has a blast doing it.
King adheres to the time travel rules (The past does not take kindly to people trying to mess with it) he sets up all the way to the end, when he doesn’t just drop the ball, he spikes it, doing the rules, the characters and the audience dirty. He wants to make a particular point, and he’s not about to let his own rules stand in his way.
That said, the ending has emotional impact, it lingers, and the whole trip was enthralling. I can object to the ending while still highly recommended the miniseries.
The characters, for me, really shone, particularly because they were so obviously flawed, including the hero, who sets up some of his own problems because he’s oblivious, insensitive, and an entitled member of the culture class. We do see some of the same, almost stock, Stephen King character types, but they’re all well realized, and there are some excellent character beats.
It would probably be more accurate to say King often includes people with certain personality disorders, like psychopathy; psychopaths, in a sense, are all the same, and share a lot of the same exploitative, cold-blooded behaviour patterns.
The hero is an earnest high school teacher, and while he’s investigating the background of the assassins, gets caught up in life in the 1960s, taking a job as a teacher, and getting involved in period drama.
There is a twist, naturally, and while you can see it coming (if you’ve read your history), it works, it makes sense, and it serves the points he’s trying to make.
Which leads to…
SPOILER WARNING!
Come back after you’ve watched it, if at all!
In the end, our hero Jake and Sadie (his love interest) foil the assassination of JFK, although poor Sadie is killed by a stray bullet. Jake then goes back to the future, only to find it a nuclear wasteland. Saving JFK has led to conflict with the Russians getting out of hand, and a nuclear war broke out. So Jake pops back in the closet to reset the future, to wipe away his changes, and seeks out Sadie again.
Then… he lets her go.
Why? Well, you see there’s this guy with a yellow tab in his hat, who is another time traveler, and he’s gone back repeatedly to save his daughter, but every time he does, she dies anyway, just in different ways.
Time finds a way to correct itself.
Living in the past, trying to right the past, all of that… don’t do it. Let it go. That’s King’s message.
So Jake goes back to the future II, and finds Sadie in old age. She’s alive. She’s lived a happy life.
It’s all very bittersweet: They only knew each other in an erased reality, and all they have are lingering good cross dimensional feelings.
However, the logic here doesn’t make sense.
First, Jake DID succeed in saving JFK and changing the future. This caused it to derail, and turn into a catastrophe. But he did succeed in massively altering the future. Billions of people who lived… now died.
Why wasn’t their future ‘fixed’?
And if people are always doomed to die at a particular time, or within a window, a gamut, then how could Sadie have lived a long life?
If time tries to maintain itself, then she should always live a long life. And if Jake didn’t try to save JFK, why would Sadie always die? She certainly seemed to die as a consequence of Jake saving JFK, along with billions of others eventually.
But if Jake doesn’t save JFK, those billions would live. Why would only Sadie then be doomed to die if Jake went back?
And it turns out she’s not doomed, or isn’t doomed so long as Jake doesn’t go back, but wouldn’t the past always be trying to keep her alive, as it doesn’t like changes?
Either Sadie always dies in 1963, or she always lives to old age. The timeline only allows one option. So why does only she get two?
She shouldn’t.
King was used inconsistent rules so he could get deliver on his melancholy don’t-mess-with-the-past theme.
But he didn’t need to break the rules: he could have just had Jake pull old yearbooks and look wistfully at her photo, or her 1963 obituary.
King’s point is correct, we should let the past go, but emotionally I’d rather see Jake and Sadie live out a happy and quiet life somewhere. Mind you, King is a hugely successful author, so what do I know?
What would have happened if Jake had taken Sadie forward into the future? That was his original plan, after all.
And what if he brought Sadie into the future, found it got all messed up, and then went back into 1960 again, with Sadie, there would be two Sadies, original Sadie and Magic Closet Sadie.
The mind boggles.
Like JFK conspiracy theories, it pays not to think about it too much.
