'Awake' on NBC HD - Page 4

Has anyone checked to see if what he read was in fact the same wording from the Constitution?
It would be funny if it wasn't, but I haven't checked.

I liked the pilot, including the cinematography. I even mentioned to my wife how much I liked the look of the show.

I'm certainly not the only one on AVSForum who has expressed a disdain for that style of cinematography, not by a long shot.

Anybody consider the possibility that he's actually asleep and the whole show is a dream.

You misunderstand. If you have a moment of lucid dreaming where you actually read text or do math you will find it all jumbled. I'm not talking about doing real world impossible things like flying.

For example, seeing a McDonald's sign and knowing that's what it says, but on concentrating on *reading* it you find the letters are all jumbled or wrong.

I must be missing something....
If both lives are a reality, why doesn't he try to get the two shrinks to meet each other?

They can't meet each other because they live in two different worlds, and he doesn't know which one is real and which one is the dream. If you're missing that you're missing the whole point of the show.

I thought of that or he's in a coma and these are his thoughts.

Well, some of my dreams are more "real" than actual reality!
So, why can't he purposely dream that they meet?

You might wanna ask Bob Newhart about that!

I think the conceit of the show is that he can't control any of this. It's just happening to him and he's going with the flow.

maybe he's dead.

I didn't know dreams had such hard and fast rules.

I'll drop it as I'm just not getting it.

The guys in charge of the show have said which of the hypotheses about him are wrong and right. I don't know if it's considered spoilerish or not, but the interviews are out there for the finding.

Without going too deep in the weeds on dreams - I can see how the conundrum of reciting the Constitution could be acceptable both ways. When we dream specifically (lucidly), our brains concoct very believable and detailed worlds. When we wake, we sometimes recall that it was a specific dream but can't recall the details anymore. Meaning that we may recall we recited the Constitution in the dream but can't recall the actual words now.

Johnny Carson once famously commented about dreams, saying essentially, that he had a vivid dream of some hilarious joke that he wanted to tell on his show and that he woke up and immediately wrote it down before falling asleep again. When he got up the next morning, the words he wrote were all gibberish. In this way, you can have it both ways.

But the conceit of the show is that these are not ordinary dreams, nor even what is clinically described as "lucid" dreams. They are as solid and real as reality itself, both of them. That's the premise they're building the show around. But I can't say at this point how it's all going to work long-term.

I think that's a great idea....assuming they're all in the same city, he should tell both shrinks to meet at a specific street corner, on a specific day and time....then he should also show up to see which doc(s) shows up.

That would mean time is the same in both "universes" (hey, maybe that's a clue). In fact, if he said "meet me here tomorrow", it would happen tomorrow in each reality and there would be only him and that reality's corresponding shrink in each one.

But here's the problem: in a dream, how could you know you were really rattling off phrases in that stilted-sounding language? After all, it never really happened. All you would have is a possibly flawed memory of it in the other reality. I've done all kinds of stuff in dreams that I couldn't do in real life but I wasn't really doing those things.

The show could be using a classic narrative trick called the unreliable narrator. Just because we saw him reading the Constitution correctly may not mean he really was, only that he thought he had when remembering it in the other reality.


Or two very lucid dreams. Remember, it's a TV show.


But remember the other thing I said? How would he know he was correctly remembering what he had read in the other reality? Was he attempting to memorize the Constitution while he read it? It looked like he had just read it, assumed it was correct, and put it down.

I think to keep this show going for very long, it will have to employ these kinds of tricks to keep the audience guessing and wondering... unless they do the Lost thing and keep adding layer upon layer of misdirection.

There are several "tests" suggested for determining if you're in a dream. Unfortunately they assume you have complete judgment while you're in a dream. This isn't always true.

For example, you can do math incorrectly in a dream and believe you're doing it correctly. If you believe that 1+2=4, no one in your dream will necessarily tell you that it's wrong. You won't know until you wake up and realize it was wrong. I have done impossible things in dreams that to me seemed perfectly ordinary until I woke up and remembered them.

Not sure what people found so scary about "Dead of Night" the 1945 version which I watched last night on Amazon but I can see the resemblance in concept to "Awake" and also where some of the original "Twilight Zone" episode ideas came from.

Or....assuming he's on the same calendar day in both realities, he could say "we're going to meet on July 3rd at such and such a place at such and such a time - wait an hour - if you don't see me - leave a message with the owner that you were indeed there - and what time it was." That way you could start to narrow down if there were date/time differences between the two realities and how much the difference is....and hopefully then be able to figure out the offset so that all could get together at some point in the future.

I get the impression that he doesn't want to know which is which. Once you become aware, the dream might end.

^^^^ he actually stated as much to the Doc.

Yeah, that's what gave me the impression....lol

Oh good, it worked.

I think he made that very clear it in the end. After the male shrink told him it's unhealthy having a fantasy that interferes with his perception of reality, he fired back saying that he would never allow anything to prevent him from living this strange dual life with his wife and his son.

I hope they can keep this mystery going. I hope it doesn't get too silly like "Life on Mars". I hope it doesn't tank in the ratings like "Daybreak" did which I thought was a great concept although too weighted down with characters and complicated subplots.

That wouldn't prove anything. He could always dream the other guy was there and the shrink for that dream would likely go along with it. He wouldn't know for sure if maybe both worlds are a dream or neither is.

Further, depending on how strong his ties are to one dream or another, he might get a false positive on one or the other. He might mistakenly dream that one doesn't show up or simply dream that one couldn't make the appointment - or refuses meet outside of the office.

The wrench in the works is he doesn't really want to know what's real and what isn't. As a result, his mind will create events to prove reality in either world.

By the same token as getting the 2 shrinks to meet, couldn't he try and get the wife and son to meet (also not possible).

What I didn't get though was exactly when the crossover in worlds happens. I guess it is random? Sometimes when he wakes up, his son is there, other times, his wife kisses him before leaving to work and makes dinner plans.

What about on a weekend? Couldn't he stay together with one or the other all day and there would be no chance for a flip?

Anyway, i liked the premiere and will keep it. I hope the procedural part is interesting, b/c like Alcatraz's or Chuck's "catch a bad guy every week", that could be a bit of a grind.

I really enjoyed 'Daybreak'! Have lent the boxset out to a number of people who liked the fact that it told a complete, complicated & compelling story in a mere 13 hours. Loved the bold choice to make a self-contained "midi-series" in the British mold with a finite story to tell and a definite ending. Don't know why we don't see more of those.

They kind of tacked something on in the last scene to make it possible to carry on if someone had asked, but the basic idea was always one and out. Bravo!

I loved the disorienting false ending that made you think everything is solved... wrong! They thought of everything to keep every episode packed with unexpected twists.


In fact I was trying to find the last time a OTA network had broadcast a planned mini-series but couldn't find it. Didn't ABC broadcast some crime mini-series with a woman cop and a crime boss who ran a house of prostitution a few years ago?

Back in the 70's and early 80's television mini-series were big deals. Adaptations of novels like "Roots", "Centennial", and "Shogun" were considered television events, a term that now sounds ridiculous. The novels were too long to be feature films so a three or four episode television series was by far the best way to present them. In 1984 the miniseries "Celebrity" (based on the Thomas Thompson novel) had 97 million viewers watching the last episode and I bet no one but me remembers it!