Does the storyline have a definitive "the end"?
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Not really... There was a curious change-up on the plot at the end of season 1 and a shocking revelation that calls into question everything that has come before and everything that could've happened had UPN done season 2, which I would've watched with baited breath!
shareIt had an ending. Many people might not have liked its open-ended nature, but that has nothing to do with anything. Many shows don't have endings, they just get cancelled and disappear, the "last episode" is usually whatever they filmed last. Nowhere Man writers knew they were writing final episodes. So they had to come up with a logical ending, and on short notice, an open-ended ending makes the most sense.
Many of Orson Scott Card's (My favorite author) stories end in a way that leave them finished yet completely open for sequels, and he doesn't do it in a cheesy way, more of an acknowledgment that if you have a story where the main characters are realistic people (as opposed to focusing on circumstances or specific events) there is never a solid ending.
Actually, it was not an open-ended ending, it was a cliffhanger. There is a difference.
In order for it to have been open-ended, they would had had to offer a possible answer to why this was all happening to Thomas Veil, leaving it up to the viewer to interpret what that answer meant. The main question of the series (Which was: "What was in the photograph that 'they' wanted the negative to it so badly?") was not given a potential answer in the final episode. It ended with Thomas watching a video of himself, in a scene that, to me, was a rip-off of "Total Recall"
The series ended on a cliffhanger that was never resolved (Very much like FOX's "John Doe" did...another canceled series I really enjoyed). Plain and simple.
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Actually the producers of John Doe later blabbed that John Doe knew everything because he had died and supposedly, according to the show, after you die everything becomes known to you, so supposedly he had been deliberatly dead and brought back to life so all the secrets of the universe could be known.
And yes I guess Nowhere Man was pretty open ended, and now in the era of Lost it was a bit of a gamechanger ending too. I wonder if they would have spent the second season discovering Tom Veil's real identity or would they have delved deeper into the real photo.
I wonder if they would have spent the second season discovering Tom Veil's real identity or would they have delved deeper into the real photo.
Mr. Hertzog sorely didn't get his core audience then.
The whole thing that makes a "Sci-Fi" fan is the driving need to ask WHY?
That's what makes a Sci-fi fan. A fan of Fantasy genre would just say " It's magic" or something. A Sci-fi fan would want to know why. It's magic just ain't the way we think.
But I have answered the why with my own ending based on the clues and the tone of the show. Humans are being invaded by some outside source possibly Aliens. I always got an "Invaders" feel to this show. The mood always struck me that these people every week that chased and hounded Tom didn't really have a clue of what the big picture was. They were nothing but pawns. No matter how high up the organization they were.
Yes! Mr Hertzog, do NOT put a huge gigantic puzzle into your show and then refuse to solve it, especially piece by piece.
shareyup, basically the writers were just lazy and wrote whatever they thought can further the suspense with cliff hanger season finales hoping to get a renewal contract, problem is audience loose interest fast once they figured out the writers really have no ideas how to finish their own stories and plug plot holes so the show get canceled, vicious cycle. shows like babylon 5 where the entire series/story arcs and in-universe mythos were planned out before production are very rare. plot driven shows like this should have it's own mythos roughly mapped out instead of throwing more subplots when it's starting to run out of steams, without an internal bible as a guide, everything the writers wrote are just basically inconsistent bulshiats no different than a hobo's rambling about government conspiracies.
if the writers are only willing to provide the 'journey' instead of a satisfying/cohesive story then we really don't need these writers because we can just write/fantasize our own conspiracy stories with conspiracies randomly chosen using a dartboard.
You had the same idea that I did!
With all the sometimes cheesy accounts of aliens analyzing human bodies to understand how they work, I wondered if an alien species might also move into trying to understand the psychology of what makes someone a human being at the most basic level, one's identity.
If that is taken away, what would a person do in order to regain who he/she is in the world (identity)?
I did love this series for all the questions it raised and all the literary associations that arose for me. The quest was so much more satisfying than any answers not arrived at without the self examination and exploration of so many philosophical approaches to examining one's psyche.
I also actively participated in the usenet group that Larry Herzog occasionally visited and sent replies to. I hated the cold hard fact that "the suits" did not allow him the latitude to fully develop the story and character arc. To me, the final episode just felt like, "let's throw everything at the wall (like cooked spaghetti) and see what sticks". I did not find any answers - only more puzzles and obfuscation.
Bruce Greenwood was perfect as Tom Veil. What a shame we all missed out on what the show could have become!
I agree it was a cliff hanger, and if the series had been renewed, I'm sure it would have just ended up being some false memories put there by who ever was manipulating him or his family and everyone else. There have been many shows that just get canceled after all the episodes have already finished production for episodes the network bought, Kings was canceled last year after only a few episodes, the sets had been torn down and the cast had moved onto other projects while the series was still airing it's third or fourth episodes, NBC did continue airing all of the 13 episodes it ordered, and the series ended with a cliff hanger. That's just the way television is sometimes, it sucks but that's the entertainment business.
If Nowhere Man had come after 24 I think people would have been more open to watching a series that had to be watched methodically every week in order to follow the plot and story line, if you missed the first few episodes of the series you would be lost.
I remember at the time a lot of critics said people would never watch a series like Nowhere Man because it had to viewed from the beginning and followed every week, unlike a series with more stand alone episodes.
I was somewhat disapointed by the ending, but I still consider Nowhere Man to be the best TV series of all time. Some of the episodes on here are not too far from some of the things going on in the world today. Check out the special features on the last DVD in this series to see what I am talking about.
My favorite episode is the one titled Stay Tuned. Another really good one is Paradise at Your Doorstep.
The only shows I have seen that even compare to Nowhere Man are Prison Break and 24.
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Fun fact: on one episode of 24 (I'm not sure which), there's a minor character named... Larry Hertzog. Larry and Joel Surnow were good friends.
shareIt wraps up some of the central questioned posed in the pilot episode but opens up a whole new series of questions: I would agree it IS about the journey (much like No.6) but any narrative needs to have some sense of closure even one that is surreal and metaphorically about the search for self.
SPOILERS AND SPECULATION:
We learn in the final episode "Gemini Man" that Tom Veil IS NOT Tom Veil; he is actually an agent with the FBI. The negatives demonstrated that the original photo had been altered. My suspicion is that the negative was just the MacGuffin to drive the plot but you could also see some purpose in their wanting it. Somehow Veil got ahold of the altered negative AND the original negatives/photos which showed that the executed men were members of Congress on the Defense Committee. They had been against a terrorist amendment (what? We're not exactly told) and they were executed. They were hung only miles from Washington D.C.
We also discovered that Veil had been "rewired" taking away his memories and life (remember that Veil's mom denied he was alive in the pilot? Perhaps she wasn't his mother in the first place but was the mother of a "real" Tom Veil who's identity he had been given and life). I suspect that the institution that Veil was taken to was a place where the bad guys not only experimented on people perfecting their mind control techniques but also essentially gave them "new" lives and those that resisted or that recovered their old ones were returned to be lobotimized.
Veil in his previous identity may have had a memory of taking the photo--he uncovered the plot, saw it take place and photographed it. The bad guys discovered that Veil had hidden the original negative somewhere and couldn't make him reveal where it was. Rather than kill him, they give him a new life and identity then take it away hoping that he will unravel who he was and reveal to them the location of the negatives as well as those people that might have known about their plans (which I think ultimately had to do with taking over the government from within)thereby flushing out anyone that could have prevented them from achieving their goal or blackmailing those who were aware of it even giving them "new identities" as needed.
Ultimately, I suspect that Gemini may have been planted in the bad guys organization to learn more about them and he was discovered. Believing that he might still be useful to some extent the bad guys kept him around with this new identity knowing that they h ad the ability to retrigger the old one if necessary (and I suspect all their attempts in the series to find out where the negatives were focused as much on trying to bring out Veil's old identity which they had done too good a job of covering up or destroying so they could discover how much he and others might really know after all).
The latter is all speculation and, yep, there are some bits of logical holes in it. The only person who knows the whole story is Hertzog and while I always feel that giving closure to a story IS important to the audience it's much more about the journey as Veil discovers who he is and isn't and that his old identity was as fabricated as any that he might have created for an undercover op. In reality, Veil when he was Gemini Man may never have really known who he was because of the type of work he did. Ironically, the identity of Veil created for him may have been the most complete "person" he had ever been.
Hopefully one of these days Hertzog will see this post or some of the others and confirm some of these points but from a narrative point of view it makes sense.
Great post, but i have to inform you that Hertzog sadly died 19 April 2008.
Time just a place
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Nope.
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