The Hiatus, Day Fourteen

Fourteen days. The finale is written up, the arguments about it have been had, and the next thing is somewhere beyond a horizon nobody has given a date to.

The obvious move is speculation, and speculation is what kills papers like this. It is infinite, it is free, and it is indistinguishable in tone from the real thing right up until the point where the reader notices they have read four thousand words that contained nothing.

The second obvious move is to cover something else, which is how a paper about one show becomes a paper about television, which is a paper nobody asked me for.

So the plan is neither. Between now and whenever, this paper is about rewatching, which is a genuinely different activity from watching and one almost nobody writes about seriously — and I have a season I have now seen twice and can finally say something about that is not just a reaction.

First time through, you do not know. That is not a small ingredient; it is the one thing a writer can genuinely control, and an enormous amount of what a season does to you the first time is the management of your not-knowing.

Take it away and the episodes sort themselves into two piles very fast. The pile that was doing something, and the pile that was withholding something.

Withholding survives nothing. An episode built on a question is an episode with a hole in it once you have the answer, and you can feel the hole — it is the twenty minutes where nothing is happening and you find yourself looking at the room.

Of thirteen, five improve, four hold, and four are visibly a delay mechanism with excellent production design. I would not have said that in July. In July I would have defended all thirteen, because in July I did not know either, and not knowing is a very effective anaesthetic.

Live, an episode is ninety minutes of television and about six hours of other people. The chat, the threads, the person at work on Monday who has not seen it and must be handled.

Alone, a fortnight later, it is ninety minutes of television. That is all it is. I had forgotten that is a thing an episode can be.

Better, because the show got my whole attention for the first time in a year and it turns out to reward that considerably more than it rewards being live-reacted to.

Worse in exactly one respect, and it is not loneliness. It is that I now hold four opinions I formed entirely on my own, with nothing pushing back on them, and I have been doing this long enough to distrust an opinion that has never met an argument. Which is, I suppose, what the hiatus is actually for, and what this paper is for until January.

The collapse happened over about five days after the finale, which is faster than the drop-off after any previous season, and the panic about it lasted roughly a week.

It was not a collapse. During a season, a place like that is mostly reaction, and reaction is fast, loud, and interchangeable — four hundred messages of which perhaps six are a thought.

The eleven a day now are people who have gone back and noticed something. They are longer. They are answered slowly. Three of the best conversations I have had about this show in four years have happened in the last fortnight, in a room everybody keeps describing as dead.

A hiatus does not kill a community. It removes the thing that was doing the talking for it, and what is left is whoever was actually interested, which is always a much smaller and much better number than the one anybody wants to admit.