“Imagine if Lost was like Lost, and then at some point in the series, someone finds a VHS tape labeled “Lost,” and it turns out the first few seasons were a tape watched by a small, dying girl in a hospital, but then it turns out, in a Bill & Ted twist, someone time travels, takes away the tape, then makes the events on the tape happen in real life, and then there’s a ghost who maybe has magic powers but can’t kill this one guy, but kills a bunch of other people, maybe some goats
THIS is the experience of reading Morning Glories.
Morning Glories is a time travel story that has flashbacks within flashbacks, flash forwards within flash forwards, and when there’s a little box that says, “The Present,” it might be the present, but it might not? Who knows? Is it Character A’s present, Character B’s?
A guy goes back in time and turns into a child, I think. Someone else goes back in time and becomes her own algebra teacher or something. Another girl thinks she needs to die, but maybe because she can’t die. People go back in time because they look at shadows. One person goes back in time for over a decade, another goes back and only has like 30 seconds. People die, they’re resurrected, they’re cloned, maybe, people see their parents killed, but maybe not their parents. It’s all just stuff that happens.
I read 7 volumes of this, and I don’t know anything, no one in the book knows what the fuck is going on, and I’m fairly certain, because the series stopped (note I didn’t say “ended,” I said “stopped) in 2016, that the creators don’t know what’s going on, either.
Which is the big thing here: this kind of story does not work without a conclusion. It’s mysteries on top of mysteries, and I realized WAY too late that it was unfinished. It’s like being on a train headed to an unknown destination, maybe you’ll like it, maybe not, but then the train just stops somewhere in the middle of nowhere Kansas because the tracks just end. “