#mostly bc i’m lurker material

[ccaleb-widogast]

Reblog if you think even the smallest of creatures deserve every chance to live as full and happily as they can.

Nuggie is a common house sparrow (passer domesticus) that I found on my doorstep when he was barely two days old, kicked from his nest for having a common deformity of the legs found in chicks whose parents consumed pesticides/insecticides.

In short, Nuggie is unreleasable, but my husband and I worked tirelessly to save him and give him a chance to live, even when all the odds (and expert opinions) were against us. His strength of will was astounding from day one. If he wanted to live that badly even after nature said no, then by God we were going to fight with him.

And he survived! He’s one year old as of the end of April and with good health and safety, he has another 12+ years to live (the domestic lifespan of a sparrow).

(Note: It’s unusual to take in an animal and have the capacity to raise it in comfort and health. Do all the research you can if you ever find yourself in a scenario like ours and contact a wildlife center if possible. It was a miracle that Nuggie lived, and it’s sadly very common for small birds not to live through what he endured. Educate yourself before you decide whether you are capable of caring for the critters you may find.)

[sparklyfabulous]

OKAY HELLO i saw this a few weeks ago and intended to add my thoughts right away but it turns out i have A LOT to say about this!! i am a consummate lurker but this is like, what i was born to do.

this entire post is a continuation of @tmp-jatp’s brilliant work, under the cut above; i’m here to fill in some blanks and offer a few other possible solutions to the inconsistencies in the show. one note about my POV here -- all else being equal, i’m always looking for ways to assume that more time might have passed (my work on this all started because i like stretching out the timeline as much as possible to give us all more room to imagine canon-compliant scenes of julie hanging out with the ghosts!)

so! this is ridiculously long so i'm putting it under a cut...

1) WHAT DAY DOES “BRIGHT” HAPPEN?

as @tmp-jatp points out, there’s a discrepancy about “Day 3″:

Carrie says on Day 1 that, “My group’s performing at the spirit rally tomorrow,” but the spirit rally [that we see on the show definitely does not happen on Day 2, and] there’s no way that there are only two days happening here, because we see the morning and night of both Days 1 and 2.

this paradox is origin of my first major hypothesis:

***Bright does not happen on Day 3, but possibly almost a whole week later!***

how can that be? well, if carrie’s line on Day 1 promoting Dirty Candy’s performance at the spirit rally “tomorrow” is accurate, how about this: what if Los Feliz HS actually does spirit rallies EVERY week?? maybe DC really does perform at *a* spirit rally on Day 2... but it’s not the one we see on the show.

and naturally it’s such a hit that they get invited to perform again the following week, during what we see in episode 2.

i know that sounds like a stretch, but stay with me here -- because there’s actually another discrepancy about Bright Day (the day formerly known as Day 3):

ray only found out about julie getting kicked out of the program on the night of Day 1, so could he really have collected all those print brochures about alternative music programs within the next ~40 hours???

by the time julie gets home from school on Bright Day, he’s already got materials from a program based in australia. where did they come from? wouldn’t they have to come by mail, from australia? we know from e1 that they keep the mail in that room/on that counter (it’s where ray left his phone!) -- i think ray went online after dinner on the night of Day 1, started obsessing about finding a new music program for julie, and requested a whole bunch of brochures.

and they arrived in the mail the following week. (bc otherwise... what, did he go out and meet with some kind of guidance counselor or music career coach? where else would he get a brochure from an australian music program if not by sending away for it??)

PLUS, and this is mostly just for fun: if 5-6 days elapse between luke giving julie the song in the kitchen scene and her actually performing it (rather than like, 12 hours), this gives julie a little more time to arrange/practice/learn it... and maybe she even did that with the band??? there’s nothing in the text that specifically rules it out (all she says to luke before going on stage is that she feels like she didn’t have “enough time” -- not how much time it actually was.

so i propose “Bright Day” is more like Day 9.

1A) DO WE KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT SPECIFIC DAYS OF THE WEEK SO FAR?

not at all, but spirit rallies feel like a friday thing to me? (this doesn’t really matter except that it’s how i arrive at the exact number of days mentioned in the next section.)

2) HOW MUCH TIME PASSES BETWEEN EPISODES 3 & 4?

i have very little to add to @tmp-jatp’s excellent analysis on the jump from FS to IGTM -- the show makes a lot of references to time that give us some good info to go on. my own timeline has it at about 11 days max (not ~3 weeks), but that’s because i already built in the extra week mentioned above, so the references to “two weeks” and “couple of weeks” and so on still work out. (mainly i like capping it at 11 days because pushing it out too much further makes it just too weird that luke didn’t already show julie a bunch of sunset curve songs before the conversation in e4!)

that makes “IGTM Day” Day 20.

2A) NOW DO WE KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT DAYS OF THE WEEK?

while i agree that e4/IGTM Day must be early in the week bc of julie’s “spent all weekend writing songs” comment... if we decide it’s mid-october now**, it could be also be a tuesday instead of a monday, with the school having a 3-day weekend for columbus day/indigenous people’s day! i’m rolling with this because, again, i just like adding more time when possible.

(**i wrote another ~thousand words about actual calendar dates but this post is already too long so instead i... made a whole side-blog about it, with multiple posts??? oops. follow @clocks-move-forward in case i do more of this.)

3) HOW MUCH TIME PASSES BETWEEN EPISODES 5 & 6?

eps 4 & 5 cover one single day, from julie imagining IGTM at school through the boys getting their first jolt in the gym after the dance. we know for SURE that IGTM Day (aka school dance day, aka e4/e5) is immediately followed by Finally Free Day (aka first dance class day, aka luke’s birthday, aka e6), because julie is late for school after sleeping over at flynn’s after the dance. (nick also says “last night’s dance” when they’re talking in class.)

[FF Day = IGTM Day + 1] so we’re saying “FF Day” is Day 21. (and maybe a wednesday, or possibly a tuesday.)

4) WHAT ELSE DO WE KNOW FOR SURE?

skipping ahead for a moment: we know for SURE that EOG Day (aka perfect harmony day) is immediately followed by UE Day (aka "interesting little relationship" day), based on two things:

first, we've got nick's line in the hallway about "last night’s performance" -- yes, that raises some discrepancies for other reasons, but set those aside for a moment.

there’s ANOTHER “last night” reference, though: when carlos is telling ray about the french dip recipe, he says “after julie played with her hologram band last night, i couldn't sleep."

that line from carlos effectively rules out @tmp-jatp's Option 3 of translating nick's line as him actually meaning anything other than literally “last night,” imo.

we also know for SURE that ST Day (...aka nothing to lose day aka "no regrets” day) immediately follows UE Day, because on UE day, julie says the garage party video is “trending on youtube”, and when the orpheum booking agent sees that same video, she says it “got half a million hits in just two days.”

(and this youtube thing, btw, is what stops me from pointing out that both nick’s and carlos’s lines on UE day are non-specific enough that one couuuuuuld try to suggest that maybe even MORE time has passed, and maybe there have been MULTIPLE garage parties... i went down that road briefly but it really doesn’t work.)

so just looking within e8 and e9... the timeline is clear enough:

[UE Day = EOG Day + 1]     and    [ST Day = UE Day + 1]

things only get weird when we try to figure out the timeline of FF Day to EOG Day.

5) HOW MUCH TIME PASSES BETWEEN FF DAY AND EOG DAY ?

at 4 minutes 30 seconds into episode 7, time jumps forward, from julie and ray and victoria talking outside the house after the “finally free” performance to julie coming downstairs while reggie sings along with ray.... but how MUCH time goes by?

i think @tmp-jatp’s Options 1 & 2 for resolving this (using non-traditional school weeks) are as good as any; i'm fully convinced that this is just an epic inconsistency by the writers. but a) it does feel like kind of a stretch to change up the whole school week structure (i just can’t deal with the idea that they go to school on saturdays, lol), and b) like i said, i just like finding ways to add more time -- so, below i will sketch out my argument for instead resolving this nonsense by sticking an extra ~week between FF Day and EOG Day.

recapping the problem:

FF Day is a wednesday (or tuesday)

FF Day is luke’s birthday

on FF Day, the dance teacher says there will be a performance “this friday"

on EOG Day, ray has been “stress-eating all week”

on EOG Day, nick says “you ready for our big performance?” (plus we see perfect harmony happen), implying that it’s now friday

UE Day is the day after EOG which would make it a saturday and there is no school on saturday, dammit

also, on UE Day julie tells luke she saw him at his parents’ house “last week, on your birthday”

soooo, here is my second major hypothesis:

***EOG Day is at least five days after FF Day***

let's look at the exact words the dance teacher says in that scene on FF Day:

"coach barron and I have decided that his lacrosse team will be part of our class for a few weeks. [...] so ladies, let's do what we learned last week, and we will perform this with the boys this friday."

i know, that’s pretty specific... but, okay, a couple of things to note here.

1) in paul becker's BTS vid of filming/rehearsing this scene, the actor playing the dance teacher says the line as "all of you will be expected to perform this on friday" -- which is just different enough that i’m willing to speculate that PERHAPS the SCRIPT could have even said something like “NEXT friday” and it just got changed by accident during shooting.

2) as @tmp-jatp points out, "perform" is a very strong word for what actually happens in the perfect harmony scene. i know nick talks about their “big performance” but there’s no AUDIENCE. maybe it’s just like the spirit rallies, and this school is just constantly having performances of various kinds? additional evidence for this: the teacher’s opening line about the boys joining “for a few weeks” would make it odd to only have a big “finale” performance only a couple of days after the first class; and when julie turns him down on UE Day, nick says “still dance partners though,” implying that even AFTER the performance we see, there are more dance classes (and performances??) still to come.

3) nick says "after three classes, i think i got worse," but we have no idea if dance class even happens every day! maybe it’s more like a 2x or 3x/week elective -- three classes doesn't HAVE to translate into "three days."

my point is that there’s no real proof in the text that EOG Day is actually “this friday” relative to FF Day. if we take the teacher’s line literally, we run into all those paradoxes listed above, but if we allow for any of my alternatives, things make much more sense.

SO, if we let go of The Friday Problem, and then add in the stuff about luke’s birthday (“last week”), ray’s stress-eating (”all week”), and the implication that willie has been checking up on alex and the boys repeatedly (like, maybe more than we see on screen? alex says “ever since caleb’s club”) ....... then i like the idea of jumping ahead from the wednesday of FF Day to the following tuesday for EOG Day.

this would make EOG Day = Day 27.

6) IN SUMMARY:

the total time that passes in the show (uh, not counting 1995) is 29 days. we see eight of them on screen, and skip ahead three different times:

Day 1 (”wake up”)

Day 2 ("this band is back”)

[skip 6 days]

Day 9 (”wow” “bright” “flying solo”)

[skip 10 days]

Day 20 (”i got the music”)

Day 21 (”all eyes on me” “finally free”)

[skip 5 days]

Day 27 (”perfect harmony” “edge of great”

Day 28 (”unsaid emily”)

Day 29 (”stand tall”)

i.... got a little carried away and made a spreadsheet*, so i’ll go ahead and link that too. here you go.

(*sure, THAT’S what qualifies as getting carried away)

In episode 6 we hear Julie mention “the past few weeks” and everything after that can’t be that much apart, but sometimes I see people talk about months - so what do y'all think was the time span for season 1?