Anna Daniels
As mentioned, the first season of Tales from the Loop is set in the fictional town of Mercer, Ohio. (Note that Mercer County, Ohio is real, and Mercer is just an unincorporated community.) Underneath Mercer, scientists from around the world conduct experiments that explore the nature of the cosmos using a massive particle accelerator colloquially referred to as the Loop. Many of Mercer’s residents — whom we meet throughout the series — are employed by the Loop in some capacity, or at least have their lives touched by the strange experiments taking place therein.
The format of the series is caught somewhere in limbo between a serialized sci-fi drama and a thematically linked anthology series a lá Netflix’s zeitgeist-y Black Mirror. While each episode of Tales from the Loop is structured like a little short story — with an internally satisfying beginning, middle, and end — the cumulative effect of the first season feeds a larger narrative. You can think of it as a short story cycle conjured onto the screen, like a cinematic version of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad or Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time.
Given the narrative complexity of the first season, the final episode had a bunch of boxes it needed to check. The finale of Tales from the Loop season 1 had to provide an effective capstone story in and of itself, while drawing together all the loosely bound threads of the preceding seven episodes into a functioning braid. The resulting story gets a bit convoluted.
Written by: Looper
