You mean cave men?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_Flat_Earth

Bugs Bunny cartoons aren't a very good way to learn history...

the explanation could be either supranatural (god like diety) or natural (alien technology or the like). either one would be such a shock to the people of the world that nothing could ever remain the same.

"a natural explanation we don't understand" - I mean it would be so outrageous that it would fit into one of the above 2 categories.

you mean like a volcano going off or something? not close to this. again this is an event that, had it happened before anytime in history, there would be records of. so this is an introduction of something new and terrible.

nitpicking inconsequential details instead of thinking about the actual concept being presented is a terrible way to learn anything. feel free to substitute the disproven previously widely held belief of your choice.

are you describing the people disappearing or the show itself?

It's not a nit when the whole line of discussion is that such events or revelations (almost) never happen - particularly ones that result in mass "death" - and your only example is completely invalid. It's not my job to present your argument for you.

i'm sorry that you are unable to take anything but such a myopic view of what i was trying to say.

my point was not that people learning that the earth was round was analogous to 2% of the population disappearing (you know this event is fiction and didn't actually happen right?), i was just trying to provide some perspective to illustrate that we do not know nearly as much as we think that we do.

i apologize for not "following the line of discussion" exactly and refusing to fulfill completely unreasonable requests to provide specific real life historical events that are equivalent to pure fantasy ones.

And my point is that nobody learned the Earth was round. At least not since we've had anything resembling civilization. It's been common knowledge at least since ancient Greece.

Your whole point is "this has happened many times before". Except the only example you've been able to come up with never actually happened.

I would say crazy alien technology and God like deities both fall under supernatural

i wasn't taking the line that we pretty much know everything about everything, not even close. and i don't think anyone else was saying that either. we are absolutely ignorant about TONS of things.

BUT we live in a largely predictable universe, and a seemingly random 2% of people instantly vanishing from all over the world is the kind of thing that has never happened in our experience.

why are you unable to understand that i wasn't trying provide an example even though i just explicitly said so?

also, are you saying that people didn't exist before ancient greece started revolutionizing humanity?

The whole, "everyone thought the Earth was flat" lie is a personal pet peeve of mine. So never mind. Thinking about it further, I believe the kinds of examples you're looking for are heliocentric vs geocentric models of the universe. Or Darwin.

But unless you're a priest or philosopher - So what? There is virtually no day to day impact on the average citizen to either "revelation". Indeed to this day, evolution denialism is very common in the more backward regions of our planet. Because unless you get an MRSA it really doesn't matter to some buy punching a clock every day.

The events in The Leftovers are wholly unprecedented in human history. The show itself compares the disappearances to plagues. Which had huge social and cultural effects but weren't completely foreign concepts. People always got sick. People always died. There were always outbreaks of various things. It's not like nobody had ever gotten a cold and then one day, bang! millions of people are dead from Spanish Flu. What's more, they had explanations for plague - They may not have been the right ones. But they had explanations.

I think the closest comparable "revelation" in our history would be the birth of the atomic age, which has had massive effects for 70 years. The cold war, McCarthyism, red scare and paranoia, proxy wars and the domino effect, fall out shelters, duck & cover, survivalism, anti-war movement, hippies, counterculture, me generation, breaking the 70's energy crisis and the waning of OPEC as a political force, the military industrial complex, 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukashima. The modern era is indelibly impacted by atomic energy.

And that's something we fully understand, is completely man made and is only a threat to most people. Can you imagine if 2% of the world's population had been vaporized by atomic energy in the 17th century?

Whatever the cause of the disappearance it is so far beyond what we are now as to be completely unprecedented. Think about it. We do not have any way to make a human body (live or dead) disappear completely from a random location without leaving any trace either of the corpse or of damage to the immediate area - at least not without physically carrying it away. Let alone to millions of people at the same instant. Even just fully disposing of a single body would require something like a blast furnace or nuclear pile.


And yet, while this kind of "revelation" is unprecedented in the history of our civilization it is far from unknown. It's just that these kinds of revelations seldom go very well for those on the receiving end. Just ask the Aztecs or anyone who ever had a missionary turn up in their village.

Couple of comments:

- I really loved the episode. Thought it was creepy enough to be okay to watch without making me want to suspend complete disbelief.
- It was depressing as all **** and it's going to be hard to get myself pumped to watch a super depressing show.
- If they are already admitting they aren't going to show us what happened or even lead us down that path then I am likely out. They could literally drag on this husband/wife/son multiple cult angle for seasons on end without any sort of resolution and that sounds boring as ****.

One thing i really like about this show is the score. It sets the mood really nicely.

Interested in where preacher dude/nora durst goes (RIP Fred Durst i guess?) and the supernatural nature of Chief and former Chief's conversation. I like the juxtaposition of confirming reality (Chief's daughter + Aimee grabbing the beer from Dodge Ram dude and finding the bagel) with the fantasy of what his dad tells him.

Really really enjoyed the second episode. Will continue to watch that black wayne guy creeps me the f out and the truck guy is pretty sweet being mysterious and all. Reminds of John Locke from Lost a bit.

Watched 2nd episode and I have absolutely NO IDEA what's going on so I'm giving up on it right here.

it tilts the **** out of me how they use an entire piece of paper to write like three ****ing words. wtf, they would go through a ton of paper.

it also tilts me how the "teenage" friend of the daughter is played by a 25 year old woman.

This seems like a pretty bad reason to stop watching a show. The fact that I don't know what's going on makes me want to keep watching.

What if God was one of us? Just a stranger on a bus, trying to make his way home.

have you never watched tv or movies before?

Haha yeah and this show is better than most, given the fact that the other girl is only 19 and the 25 year old looks pretty young.

I like the spectre of the supernatural that the show is giving us. We don't really know what to think about some things - like is the Mystery Man real (well now we know), or is the Chief's dad 100% crazy, or even where the eff did my bagel go - but these are the same things people in this world would be constantly combating. the fabric of their universe has been ripped apart so they would questioning their reality at all turns. even completely lunatic things to us, like Wayne healing people through hugs, how could you outright dismiss that anything is possible?

I don't know if that tone can last though.

i know it's standard(or at least it used to be) to cast 20somethings to play high schoolers. but good quality stuff uses actual kids to play kids and it's almost always better that way.

you could see in one of the shots the bagels were not in the oven where he put them. i noticed that right away, and thought it was just a continuity mistake. they might have reappeared again before he eventually lost them. i'm too lazy to go back and look

Except that they hinted they might not ever tell us. Otherwise 2nd episode more intriguing than the first. Wonder why there was a several week jump though (Liv Tyler said she's been with them for weeks).

IDK if it's an HBO thing or something unique to my cable company, but for whatever reason I can seemingly never find all episodes of a show on the HBO On Demand channel. The only time all Game of Thrones eps were available was in the runup to season 4. I looked last night and season 1 of VEEP wasn't on there either, the first ep available to watch was s2 e1.

I have no idea why it is this way but it is very frustrating.

I am glad she is cause she turns me on. Glad she isnt played by a 14 year old or i would feel even creepier. Emily Meade for Miss OOT