The Ending of 'Palm Springs' is the Beginning of a Nightmare
If you haven't caught Palm Springs on Hulu yet (warning: major spoilers ahead) ...
... it has a fairly happy ending. They throw in some weird bullshit to confuse you, but it's pretty clear that the two leads, Nyles and Sarah, made it out of the time loop they got trapped in when they entered a mysterious cave on a California beach. (And to think, all we've ever found in those are used needles, and, that one time, Gary Busey.) They're floating along in the pool Nyles had taken to "borrowing" because the family who owns it was out of town on the day he constantly relived, they're caught when the family finally returns the next day, everything is sunshine and unexplained dinosaurs.
But what happens next? How is Nyles going to return to any kind of normal life? Sarah will be fine; she wasn't in the loop long enough to forget her life. We see her drive all the way back to her home in Austin, but does Nyles even remember where he lives? At one point, he realizes he has no idea what he even used to do for a living. And who's going to tell him? He's at a destination wedding with his presumably soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend's friends, where he has to keep being introduced as "Misty's boyfriend," so it's basically like dropping an amnesia patient into the middle of nowhere where nobody knows them.
Maybe he can figure out all that stuff because he, like, has an email account, but that's just the beginning of an entirely new problem. Even if he finds out he's a civil engineer or whatever, do you think he remembers how to be a civil engineer? Either a lot of bridges are about to collapse, or he's going to be thrust into an identity crisis as he tries to figure out what to do with the rest of his life. What if he suddenly finds out, probably when he sees a mysterious debit from his bank account, that he's a divorced father of two? What about the rest of the friends and family that he definitely has somewhere?
He's going to have to rebuild all those relationships from scratch, and he can never tell them the truth about why. It could be pretty simply explained as mysterious amnesia because even the world's foremost brain experts have no idea how brains work, but this is a man who's died over and over, including countless suicides. He's seen some shit, and he can't even tell a therapist because they'll think he's just delusional. Untreated PTSD is no joke, especially if you can't tell anyone about it. What a lonely, painful life that sounds like. Honestly, he might have been better off staying in the time loop. At least it has an open bar.
Manna frequently jokes about her own memory problems on Twitter.
Top image: Hulu
