We see who the original elders are. It seems that they form the community by themselves and didn't bring anyone else in. We're showing each of the household with her children are. In their children don't seem to be any older than about maybe 23 or 25. So it begs the question - Who the hell are all these other young people? Who are all these other people in their 20s and 30s, and where did all these children come from? It just doesn't make any sense.
shareI just watched it again after many years. When they're near the end they're showing pictures from the grief counseling group (?) they were apart of, together, one of them is holding a baby. I believe it's Lucius. If he was born in the 70's, then maybe they've been there about 25 years, maybe 30. So, in that time they could've married another in the Village and had children of their own from ages 18 on up. Maybe they took more families with them that aren't mentioned? Maybe their own families? Without doing the math, if each original member brought with them siblings, it's quite possible all those children are from the original 'settlement'.
TheClan
"He has the most beautiful skin in captivity."
They had no birth control....so...
shareYeah that is something I found problematic. There were other adults in the village besides the elders. How did they get these people to join and at the same time brainwash them and not let them know the secret of the whole thing. In order to have all the adults believing that, there would have needed to be at least a generation before them but there wasn't. The children could have been deceived but the adults could not have been. It means they would have also been in on the secret not just the elders.
shareEdward probably put up an invitation flier at other grief counselor meetings and recruited more people from there.
What I didn't quite understand was how did Edward and the Elders cut off relations with relatives and friends who didn't join his group? Also, what exactly was the arrangement with the Park Services that kept larger entities like the State of Pennsylvania or even the Feds at bay? It's not really that easy to just walk away and disappear without generating inquiry from not only relatives and friends but also the Department of the Interior, the IRS, and so on.
Evidently the "Walkers" had money/influence. The name of the entire compound was something like "Walkers nature preserve". The guard said he (Walker) had "arranged" something with a government official to keep planes from flying over. So evidently Mr. Walker (William Hurt) had a lot of money/power.
As for all the people being in the village, I think that the "Elders" were the founders but they brought more people with them when they formed the village. I can't answer how all of them could simply cut all ties with friends/family on the outside, other than to say that maybe one of the requirements to join originally was that you had no ties with anyone on the outside. Mr. Walker probably used his same government connection to take care of the whole taxes/SS situation that all the adults would have had.
So evidently Mr. Walker (William Hurt) had a lot of money/power.That just exposes another weakness of the plot. A person with enough power to sway government legislation would never be able to just disappear into a private compound without outsiders looking to see what he's up to. share
When you live in a middle of nowhere in a medieval village and your only entertainment is sex, this is the result.
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The spirit of abysmal despair