1. The timeline -- The flashbacks earlier this week clearly portrayed these men in their mid-twenties when twenty-five years ago, they were at least a decade older. These men are clearly pushing, if not already are sixty, no question about it. Alan, Ed, Billy, and Buzz are grandfathers, and Josh has a grown daughter (even if you take away rapid aging, she would be turning seventeen in June). But that's just conventional wisdom for those who have no real knowledge of these characters' history. If you've checked their histories on web sites you know that Ed and Alan, who were both on the show in 1977 (although Alan's first appearance was nearly a month after this incident), were not only older they both had children. Going for a night out like young truants just wasn't likely. Then there is the sticking point of Buzz's involvement. This has been a problem since the beginning; Buzz disappeared after Vietnam. Here we have a young Buzz, way too young to have seen years of Vietnam action, saunter in, care free into a carnival and gets, well buzzed out of his mind. Now if you were trying to escape the horrors of war, what would you do? Would you go to a carnival? Heck, should we tell all those soldiers who have suffered post-traumatic stress to just go a fair and forget their troubles? The flashbacks tried to address why he would be there at all, but they did it so poorly, they shouldn't have bothered. Besides, are we supposed to believe that Ed, Josh, and Billy decided for the sake of their secret do such a good job of concealing they knew Harley and Frank's father wasn't dead? Heck, Billy was married to Nadine; his tie to her ex wasn't hard to keep quiet? A bigger example of a poorly planned timeline is that Maryanne's tombstone put her age at 37 when she died. So either the casting director made a major oops by hiring people that instead of being in their late thirties looked like they'd just stopped suffering from acne outbreaks or more likely, Ellen Weston forgot. You want a really sad fact? If they had just said Maryanne was killed in '67 instead of '77, it would have worked better. The ages would have fit for starters. Only Ed was on the show back then and around that time had a string of car accidents he was involved in (and fled no less). You'd still, however, run into a problem with Buzz, but tweaking the time he left for Vietnam is a lot less egregious I think than what they attempted here.
