If nothing else, at least today we are rewarded with this howler of a punchline. Give me a friggin’ break.
The comments over the course of the last few weeks have been magnificent, and there’s not a whole lot I can add here. It is indeed disappointing that, whatever the circumstances behind Batiuk retiring his flagship, he chose to go out this way. Instead of even trying to put a neat bow on things, he pulls out this dreary, mysterious “Custodian” to explain how he “gently nudged” events over four decades, to ensure that Summer writes a book that, it turns out, she would have written anyway.
Put this in your book, Summer:

If you’re going to write a time travel story, you either totally ignore all the possible, unintentional ramifications of transtemporal travel, or you make the story about those ramifications. Either way, doing so requires a fair amount of narrative skill. That is, at least make it entertaining enough so that hidebound literalists and beady-eyed nitpickers don’t feel compelled to tear it apart. Gosh, this arc is infuriating. Given his seemingly supernatural gifts, surely there was some way that Hedley could have gotten back the