[Ghoulish Delight]

By the way, who here watched the 2hr pre-show?

We did. While in the middle of it I found myself sort of wishing I wasn't watching it. I've purposely avoided the podcasts and such. I'm a TV show purist in the sense that I want what I need to know to be shown on screen during your allotted time slot. I want to see the show and decide what it means to me, not have the producers hold my hand and tell me what they want me to get out of it. If they can't communicate that within the confines of the show, then they've failed at creating their show. So I was kinda bummed that I was going into the finale with that "guidance" for the first time.

But in the end I was glad I watched it. I still take the points away for it needing to be there. But the show had gone wildly off track, and watching that helped me focus on what the creators and writers considered the important elements and forget about the extra stuff they tried on for size but never got to fit. Even if a lot of what they defined as important was only so in hindsight, I took it as, "Here are things we tried that worked and aided the themes that we had in mind, don't worry so much about the stuff we tried that didn't. Our bad."