Posts
Last Entry…
That is to
say this is the last one talking about “Candle Cove”. I have talked about Creepypasta, the show as an idea, the first three episodes, the last three episodes, and even my praise and criticism of that program, today I will talk about one last thing on this
subject.
I will
provide an answer to the question, “Well, if you’re so smart, what would you
do?”
What I Would Have Done
I say all
this as a guy who generally does not like giving negative reviews, as I find
products like "Candle Cove" to be so disappointing for their failed
potential.
Just from
that starting point of strangers doing casual research on a TV show from them
as a kid you could go in a hundred directions, and “Channel Zero” chose one of
them, and then put in WAY TOO MUCH EXTRA STUFF.
Let me just
throw out some basic ideas, adhering as close as I can to the initial premise
of the Creepypasta that started it, and then weaving it out from there to
incorporate other Creepypastas, and even other aspects of internet’s toxic and
insane “culture”.
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| Yeah, I am using this image again, because it looks great... And this is foreshadowing. |
Let’s Begin
Have
someone, let’s call him Jason watching a show with their kid and begins to reminisce
about shows he watched as a child, mention several real and fictional shows
without missing a beat (this will actually be foreshadowing).
Jason starts
to remember another show he saw as a child.
Having it right on the tip of their mind he decides to research it by
creating an account on a TV show forum and posting what he recalls. This is where you start introducing the other
characters, who read the question and start recalling their time watching as kids.
After they
start posting about it the show starts to haunt them. They look thru old school binders for crayon
drawings to jog their memories. Then
they start to have haunting things happening, walking into their house and the
TV is on but showing blackness and the sound of a static hiss. They start having dreams about being kids and
the puppets talk to them like they are a character in the show. One of them has a relative that is suffering
from dementia who starts to sing songs from the show. One of them gets lost while going home and
when they find their place someone else is living there. These events start to pile.
The group
starts looking into it all more and more.
Finding old forums and youtube videos that mention TV shows like “Candle
Cove” and others talking about songs from the show, but nothing solid. (Speaking as someone who has killed hours
looking up old cartoon theme songs on youtube, this sort of behavior can be
really engrossing).
They start
chasing down old VHS recordings of the show to no avail. They look for toys or puppets on Ebay. Communicating with each other more and more,
becoming friends as each of them become more and more consumed with the idea of
finding this old show.
The Middle
While their
research is going on subtler things have to start showing up to indicate the
haunting(?) of them by the show. People
with out of date cloths, old cars, old turn dial phones, and other indicators
of being out of time start to show up.
TV’s stop looking like the big black flat rectangles, and more and more
tube TV’s start showing up. Fewer mp3
players, more CD’s and tape decks.
Everything starts to look cruddier.
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| I feel less at home around this junk. |
After a
time one of the members of the online group stops posting on anything and the
others lose contact with them. The group
makes a decision to end the long-distance nature of their friendship and, “go
on an adventure”. They all decide to
meet in person and find their missing member.
Ideally, the missing member would be Jason, the person who the audience
started the show with. Emphasizing how
unmoored the narrative’s reality has become.
As the
number of strange instances in their lives grows, with waking dreams, erratic
moods, seeing images of static on TV’s and computer monitors (something modern
monitors don’t do), the group start to doubt their own perceptions and begin to
question why they are dropping everything to leave and go look for someone they
have never met. As one of the secondary
characters leaves their apartment with a bag, they turn to go back home and
drop the whole thing, but Janet’s place is now gone entirely, replaced with an
office building. No turning back now.
It all
seems absurd, crossing the country to help someone they only know online
because they became friends recalling a TV show no one else in the world seems
to remember. When they all arrive in Jason’s
town things seem askew. The town has old
architecture and a small-town feel, but Janet and the other heroes all feel a
sense of familiarity to it.
They
investigate and find a woman in a local old folks’ home that is Jason’s mom,
when they go to talk to her she claims she has no son. They keep telling her that Jason is her child
and is missing, but she denies it. They
blame dementia, but they suspect something else is at work.
Janet calls
their mom and asks about the show being told that she would watch a static
screen as a child and then talk about a show that she made up. Instead of an imaginary friend, she had an
imaginary show. Another member, Billy
goes to call their parent but their mom doesn’t know who they are and tells
them not to call back, they try their other parent to the same result, they try
to call a sibling and can’t find them (this sibling should be established as
younger and close to the character, not recalling the show because they had
just been a baby).
The
characters have now been isolated from a world that the increasingly do not
recognize.
Last Third
The
characters start to come to a realization that since they came to Jason’s town
they haven’t gotten a call, text, or any internet communication from anyone but
other members of the group. When Janet tries
to show the group that she contacted her mom by calling her back, Janet’s phone
just tells her that the number doesn’t connect to anything.
As they
start to pool their knowledge of the show, that the puppets went on an
adventure in a cave and came into contact with something called “Skin Taker”
they notice that there are no lights outside the room they are in. The room hangs in darkness, and the TV comes
on and starts playing the show with their missing member appearing as a
puppeteer and he begins to tell them what is wrong.
Here is my
ultimate twist. I ultimately want the
story to be about the Mandela
Effect. The characters are unstuck from their universe. They would have
just lived in the new universe, but by peeling at the broken memory of their
childhood they opened a temporal scab.
They are now drifting, lost in time and space. The TV clicks off and the room goes dark.
A puppet
show starts playing to the audience at home, with Janet as a puppeteer asking,
“Where am I?”
Damn It!
I swear to
god, I wrote out that “What I would do”, hit save, and turned in my chair to
see my brother stepping silently into my room.
I yelled, “Jesus Fucking Christ”.
I have not been startled that badly in years. I stupidly primed myself to be creeped out
and then BAM! Completely innocuous thing
hits at just the right time.
Anyway…
The theme to
my version is: Don’t dwell on inane shit from your childhood, it causes you to
divorce from reality. I draw on elements
that only exist in the original story and extrapolate from them. The INTERNET and communication thru it is a
core plot element. The idea of
researching the show causing the problem is a core element.
Sure, I cut
in the Mandela Effect something that was not explicitly referenced in the
original story. BUT, one of the most
cited instances of the Mandela Effect is childhood TV shows, things that no one
else remembers. This addition is a
natural extension of the material into another internet cultural element.
Maybe I
should not be writing fan fiction about Creepypasta, but then again, “Channel
Zero” does. And with far less respect
for their source material.
I will also
freely admit to drawing inspiration from the novel “Ubik”, by Phillip K
Dick. In the novel, a group of psychics
are unstuck from time after surviving a bombing. The world around them starts to devolve back
thru time and some of them wither to mummies.
The idea of branching timelines is a big part of the narrative, that and
making fun of consumer culture and AI, but I will leave that for another fan
fiction.
In Conclusion
I was
frustrated by this show. But having
written this blathering down and distributing it to the world I feel a little better. No longer carrying around ideas that I haven’t
bothered to write down. Hopefully, I
made some sense and was mildly entertaining.
Happy
Halloween.
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