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Comment by Justin_K | Hacker News Reader

To me, it means viewers disliked the last season they watched but hung in through to end, in hopes for something good. It didn't deliver, so they didn't bother with the next season.

This is based on my opinion of the above said show.

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This is exactly what happened with me, my roommate at the time, and my girlfriend. Season 1 was an excellent arc and was super well done from start to finish. However, because sometimes having satisfying twists requires dropping some hints here and there, and because the internet hive mind is incredibly good at predicting twists based off of hints, essentially the entire plot of the first season was successfully predicting through reddit collaboration and consensus after like the second episode, which then got distributed as usual through articles, social media, etc. I think the people who made the show were disappointed in this, and from what I can tell, the solution they seemed to have come up with was to make the plot of the second season so convoluted and the final "twists" so ridiculous that no one would predtict them. This worked, but it also ended up making it very dissatisfying overall, and with the clear implication that the show would be taking place in the "real word" instead of in the mostly closed off sandbox of the theme park, it didn't seem super likely that the writers would be able to improve on the previous season given the new setting, so I just didn't bother watching after that.

I predicted a lot of Season 2 during Season 1, though I was called a bit of a quack for it at the time. I don't think they tried to complicate it because of people solving the Season 1 puzzle box, I think they picked too esoteric of a plot framework (lost books of the bible/biblical "fan fiction") at the start of the series bible and S2 was always the planned consequence of S1.

I blame Neal Stephenson for this, both in why I spotted the things that I did and where a lot of S2 came from even though it felt so left field for the average viewer.

(I tend to refer to S2 as the "Futurama's Robot Church" season and think it makes a lot more sense when you see it as a struggle between the Robot God and the Robot Devil, and the Robot Devil is not who most people think it is despite S1 laying out a lot of hints.)

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