Noticed a really eerie detail about Chuck's death

The opening of Season 2, episode 2 ('Cobbler') is Chuck sitting at the piano playing Faure's Sicilienne Op 78. I noticed that the exact same piece is played over his funeral procession in Season 4 Episode 1 ('Smoke'). Not sure if this has been discovered before.

If I were to do some broad-strokes analysis... its readily apparent that Chuck is struggling with the piece while he is playing it, unable to get it absolutely perfect the way he wants it to be. He makes mistakes that aggravate him, he starts to look a little unhinged when he starts banging on his head in frustration. Take that little incident and multiply it by 100 and you get Chuck's meltdown at the end of Season 3's 'Lantern', where he rips apart his own house just to find that one source of electricity, which had catalyzed the violent obsessive mania that eventually culminates in his own suicide. I'm not entirely sure what was going through Chuck's mind in that moment, but it appears to me that his need for things to be absolutely perfect and in order is present in both instances - the piano and the electrical meter - which leads me to believe that the piano moment was a subtle foreshadowing to the mental state in which Chuck inhabits at the end of Season 3, and foreshadowing of his death.

At the end of the piano scene, he stares at the metronome sitting on the piano lid, ticking away at a slightly imperfect tempo, counting down the seconds. In the context of all this symbolism related to his death, that metronome no longer a measure of tempo, but is a cosmic clock that is counting down to his last moments. Yet the seconds are not perfect seconds. The beats drag on a hair too long and it disgusts him.

The fact that the same piece is playing at his funeral leaves me in little doubt as to its symbolic value. It's an ode to Chuck, a swansong for a character whose fate was written on the mylar-covered walls. This to me completes the implicit foreshadowing begun in Cobbler about his eventual death. It's like the universe had hand-picked the most appropriate tune to play him off stage.

Submitted November 02, 2019 at 07:44PM by ultimatefetus https://ift.tt/2JHAhKm