12:01 PM

The dad from That 70s Show IS Bill Murray AS Phil Connors IN 12:01 PM. Via yesterday’s nth annual MetaFilter thread celebrating existentialist classic Groundhog Dog, which also links to the aggressively dickish “Endless Eight” arc on the Japanese television series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

David Milch Against Endings

In teasing the season of Deadwood that never was, David Milch comes out against endings.

For himself he says, “every episode is an ending of sorts” and imports meaning into one of the final murders by Swearengen, in which he cleans up the blood after.

Still, he rails against “the idea of an end of a thing as inscribing the final meaning.”

Endings that supposedly “fixes the mark and meaning of any experience is one of the lies agreed upon that we use to organize our lives,” he says. A bigger lie, he says, is that “we were entitled to a meaningful and coherent summarizing of something which never concludes.”

Milch says he hopes viewers enjoyed the series keeping in mind its meant to “import no truth beyond itself.”

Naturally, I almost completely disagree. In literature and in life, lies or not, there are few things more important than endings, precisely because endings are never final.