unforum

[paladin181]

I said forgettable.

The entry itself is fine. As a resolution to the past five years of my life watching this show? I feel jaded and like I want my money back. I feel like they took us on this ride, made us care about the characters and then completely forgot about giving us some closure and time to grieve. Tim, after Jay's death doesn't even care. Same with Brian. He just "Jay disappeared" or "Brian was the hooded guy!" in white text and forgot about them completely. Kinda takes some of the shine from their character arcs.

I'd love to have found Hoody's hideout. The one with all the batshit insane scribblings on the walls and his stash of video editing equipment. I'd also like to know why Brian/Hoody was granted amnesty by Alex. He wasn't pissed at Brian when he found him in the building. He just tells him to wipe that stupid grin off his face and tell him where to find Jay and Tim. That moment felt weak for two people who supposedly wanted to kill each other.

The Jessica thing didn't affect me one way or another when she was revealed. Ok, she's alive. Again, their lack of ability to make me care about the characters' mortality status is pretty evident. Why couldn't Tim tell Jay "Jessica's alive and she's gone away to get away from everything?" Then Tim and Jay get along, Jay doesn't get shot, and we can have our lovable bumbling protagonist over the mere vessel of story progression that is Tim. Tim was so bland and unrelatable as the protagonist because he exhibited ZERO emotions about his friends, the show, or anything that was happening. Tim as the main protagonist literally felt like Troy had to abdicate from the shooting and the protagonist role was being filled by an actor to be named at a later date.

I feel like my investment into this series (which is not nearly as much as the creators who endured automobile accidents, script rewrites, tornadoes and crazy fans as well as HOURS AND HOURS of shooting film) has been betrayed for almost nothing. It's not just the ending but the last half of season 3 that feels like they started phoning it in. They got their awesome stunt of "burning Tim's house" in there, and pretty much that was it.

Alex went from crazy puppet of the operator to quasi sympathetic anti-hero. His actions have been SO all over the place (the aforementioned not trying to kill Hoody when he had the chance, the phone call to Jay telling him to leave, etc). A lot of his actions now make absolutely NO sense and his inability to actually kill some people is unbelievable. I almost think killing Jay was a complete accident he's so bad at actually killing people.

Another question I have is, where was the Operator when Tim killed Alex? He's stopped Tim/Hoody from killing Alex before. Why not now? Tim can resist the Operator, but he's not exactly fully functional whilst doing so. So why didn't it pop in to save him then? Inconsistency without explanation isn't mysterious, it's lazy. The last part of this season has felt pretty lazy over all.

Ok. Venting over. I. LOVED. THIS. SERIES.

As a whole, this series was a fun ride and if the end of it kind of makes me wish I'd just stopped watching at the beginning of Season 3, then oh well, it's still a fantastic series. It's flawed; everything is. But it is a great over all piece of work with a terrible build and payoff at the end.

[Spritey]

Days later, I still don't know how I feel about this ending. Seasons 1 and 2 both had extremely impactful final entries, and this one was strangely...not. I get the feeling that Jessica being alive was supposed to be some huge reveal, but I didn't really feel it. If anything else was revealed, I must have missed it.

I feel like by killing off Jay and Brian before the finale, they kind of created a situation where the ending would HAVE to feel boring. Imagine if they killed off Walt in the fourth-to-last episode of Breaking Bad. Doesn't really work, does it?

I love Tim and everything, and his acting is some of the best in the series, but to me, it doesn't make sense to kill off the main character before the climax has happened.

Overall, season 2 is still my favorite. It's expertly written with little filler, and everything comes together so perfectly in the end.

[Spritey]

[Geneaux486]

[Blackout_2014]

[Geneaux486]

I don't think its motives are that... comprehendible. It seems to just feed off of madness, chaos, and death, and compels its victims to do anything to cause those things.

[SilentMedusa]

After some time to think it over, I still don't like this ending.

I guess I feel like if there was one time to be straightforward with us, this was it. Instead, to get any kind of resolution out of this, I have to assume X means Y, and hope that's actually true (and frankly, too much of season 3 is like that). For me it's only been a year, but still.

As for the Lost comparisons, I didn't watch but the first two seasons of that, so I wouldn't know. But consider this: with Lost, all people had to do was watch. With Marble Hornets, people had to watch, listen, enhance screen shots, reverse audio and run it through a spectrograph, learn binary, decode, etc. That's a lot more work. And I think we just didn't get a fair payoff for all the work done over the years.

I still love Marble Hornets, and I'll definitely check out their next project, but I feel like this is going to be another case of the fan fiction making more sense than the cannon. And that's a shame.

ETA: Actually, I think I can sum up my problem here. The ending was meant to be ambiguous so we could all decide for ourselves what happened and what it meant. That annoys me; no one told me MH was supposed to be a Choose Your Own Adventure.

[Blackout_2014]

[Shockwave]

[Smoking_Gnu]

So...5+ year series, ending that loses major steam during the final act with a load of unanswered questions and gloss-overs, general feeling that the series as a whole was still worthwhile despite said rage-worthy ending...

Mass Effect 3, anyone?

[Blackout_2014]

[DHawk314]

Why Alex gave Jay the tapes was discussed pretty heavily I think in 72. Alex thought everything was his fault, do he gave Jay the tapes to make himself look like the victim. He probably was going to burn them originally, which is probably why he panics and attacks Jay. Then, he freaks out about that and runs away.

That's exposition, but it's exposition based on things shown about Alex in both 70 (Alex's motives insofar as how this started for him originally) and of course 71. And then of course Tim and Jay go on to say that they're not sure if all that's the case, because there's no real way to find out. I think that's part of the issue. We think of "Confirmed" and " Never revealed" as existing in these binary states, but in Marble Hornets, some things are revealed to an extent but left slightly ambiguous for the sake of realism and atmosphere.

Plus it just allows for alternate interpretation, which I just don't think is a bad thing. I think we just think it's a bad thing because we have a boner for "getting answers." Maybe that's not our fault, maybe that's the fault of the writers, but honestly, I just don't think centering around our question boner was ever the nature of the series.

[Blackout_2014]

[Spritey]

[Lytrigian]