German Series Souls is Your Next New Favorite Show. First, hats off to Chris – basically the administrative wunderkind who has found numerous great movie recommendations and shows and, and, and. So, kudos, Chris on another great find. And what is this, Souls thing? “Three women whose lives turn upside down when Hanna’s son, Jacob, is involved in a serious car accident and claims that he remembers his earlier life as a pilot of a lost passenger plane.” Which, isn’t right at all. Maybe a more accurate assessment would be more like – “A woman is caught in a horrible time loop as she attempts to keep her husband from piloting a flight later that evening. She’s caught between hope and grief as she fails time and time again. Later, the repercussions of this loop and the existential loop splashes across generations as everyone tries to make sense of it all.”
Well, I’m bringing you a show I have no idea how you are going to be able to watch right this second. I’ve reached out to Sky TV, and their communications department, to see if I can get an interview lined up, and more information about release dates for Europe, as well as for the United States. I believe that SKY TV is owned by NBC Universal, so I’d assume that they’d have the international rights outside of Europe. But we shall see. Even VPN access for you guys would be cool in order to watch this amazing show. I’ll keep you informed right here if I learn more.
Souls Series Walkthrough Discussion
Do not continue reading if you haven’t had a chance to watch Souls yet – I’ll be walking through lots of spoiler materials so that we can talk about the deeper meanings of the show at the end. Fair enough? Thanks for that.
As Souls opens, we watch as Allie does everything she can to prevent her husband Leo, her best friend and beloved, from flying that evening. Because, if he figures out a way – and he always does – he will die. Him and everyone on the plane, all 130 souls on board. So, day after day, Allie bribes Leo to keep him out of the air, she tries to convince Leo by convincing him personally, she connives and manipulates… nothing keeps Leo from flying that day. So, over and over, and over again, Leo gets into that plane, and he dies, over and over and over again. And Allie, immediately after failing… commits suicide in order to give it another try at saving her husband and everyone on board.
Linn, a 25-year-old, joins a cult. The cult, whose members are desperate to believe in life after death of some form or another. And they want their cult leader, Sebastian, to show them the truth of this… to offer them some other truth to hold onto than this life they are living today.
Also, Hanna, a woman who awakes after a terrible car accident, learns that her son, Jacob, managed to not only save her, but also the lives of another family as well. It’s almost like he has lived through another traumatic, underwater death-like experience, before. He was so perfect in his response. Perfect in every way… it shouldn’t be possible that he would be able to save everyone in that car accident. And yet he did.
The Various Threads of Souls
What is going on here? Well, the clue that should tie these threads together for you is the fact that we are given a PAST, PRESENT, and FUTURE tense for each of these different threads. Past focuses on Allie and her husband Leo. She is focusing on saving her beloved husband’s life. Allie though is pregnant, and she has to ultimately make a decision on behalf of her daughter… and letting go of her husband. And so she does. She stops committing suicide, starts writing a book, and raises her daughter.
Turns out, her daughter’s name is Linn. As Linn begins to grow up, she starts to resent the father she never met, and the love that her mother has for him. It’s almost like her mother wishes she could have saved Leo at the expense of her own life. So much so that when a teenager, Jacob, shows up in their lives believing that he has been embodied by the reincarnated soul of Leo… Allie would much rather believe Jacob, then listen to her own daughter. And Jacob, he isn’t doing well with his newfound fame and hero status. Why? Because while he was underwater, he was being infested by the soul of the pilot that died years earlier.
Turns out, Jacob knows that Leo, and the people that died on flight 2205, did not die heroes. They didn’t thwart a terrorist attack like the media has attempted to claim. Instead, it turns out that the air traffic controller who attempted to assist the pilots, screwed up his assessment of the flight. And it was this mistake that cost the lives of the passengers and crew. And Jacob is the only one who knows, because he now is Leo. Jacob is the pilot of that airplane. But when Sebastian comes to test Jacob on this “truth,” Sebastian tells Jacob that he lied beginning to end. Huh? What?
Which brings us to Linn, Leo and Allie’s daughter, who goes looking for a cult to learn whether or not there is an afterlife. She wants to know if what Sebastian is selling is true. Actually, we learn, that Linn doesn’t want anything other than to prove Sebastian wrong… to prove that he is a sham, and to get her mother, Allie, to focus on this life for once. But the deeper Linn goes down this cult rabbit hole, the more unmoored Linn becomes. Eventually she does admit that she resents her dead father. She admits that she only came to prove Sebastian wrong, and she ultimately ends up doing everything she didn’t want to be a part of there at the cult. But, on the 25th anniversary of the airplane crash, Sebastian decides he’s had enough. He’s going to end it all by putting rocks in his pockets and jumping into the river. But who happens by? Other than Leo! Saves the day.
The Denouement of Souls
Then as Souls barrels in to the back end, and The Prestige of this particular magic trick, we learn that Linn, though she said she had told her mother everything – she actually hadn’t. And although she and her mother had decided this whole thing was over – the cult, Jacob, all of it? But actually it wasn’t – and when the cops were raiding the cult after Sebastian stabbed himself… was on his way out, he tells Linn that Jacob really was Leo. But how did he know? Well, remember when Sebastian jumped in the river with rocks in his pocket? And Jacob saved him? Well, he put his hand on his chest and began humming – it was a thing he used to do to calm Allie down. And he also told Sebastian radio frequencies and other things that only the pilot and the air traffic controller would have known. So Sebastian was convinced that Jacob was Leo.
But Linn needed to know for herself. She just has to know. Sure, he lied before – but Sebastian said… and she has to know. Flash back to when Jacob was forced to apologize to all the families of those that died, and that was why when Allie tried to connect with him to find out, he had cut her off. Jacob realized that he just needed to be there for his mother – who’s lover had just been murdered by her husband – to be her son, not some disembodied dead pilot. So he shut it all down.
But when Linn goes looking for Jacob again – he lies to her again. He tells her that he isn’t who he said he was. But ultimately, Linn figures him out… figures out that he’s lying, he’s still trying to make everyone happy by being who they want him to be. So he agrees to come see her in the hospital, and the only thing she asks him is simple. And we watch as Leo and the plane begins to crash. We watch as the students eerily begin singing an aria or some such hauntingness… and we watch as Leo is beginning to drowned. The last thing he does is to pull a note from his pocket. He reads it right before he goes under the water.
“What was the thing he wrote in the note to me?”
“It was one word… it was a name.” And they both look at Linn.
The Ending of the Show Souls Explained
Love love love this show. Why? Because it reminds me of The OA… if you haven’t watched that, you really need to. At least season one. I still think Netflix screwed up big time when they cancelled that show. They gotta give Brit another shot at a final season. Anyway… it had that same haunting beauty to it. A story about the supernatural in a hyper-logical world. A story about otherworldly beauty in a world that requires everything to make some sort scientific sense. Souls similarly straddles that line, between spiritualism and logic, so perfectly.
But if you didn’t understand the ending of the show Souls I have your explanation for you. The story is ultimately about a family of 2… and a third – as yet unborn. A story of perfect love. But that third was trapped in sadness, tragedy, and loss when her mother’s love died in a plane crash. Allie spent so much of her life twisted in grief… living, reliving, and reliving it. So Linn watched as her mother wrapped around the axis of loss, and couldn’t let go of it. And when a cult promised her life again after this life, and a reunion with her husband through the release of guilt, doubt, and forgiveness of sin, she takes it. But all it does is make her afraid – it breaks her.
So Linn goes in, and she is going to kill Sebastian. That’s all she was there for, revenge. She was going to break this guy, and his lies. And she was going to do it so that she could tell her mother the key to prove his lies… and she was going to share those lies with her mother to break her free from the hold that Sebastian still had on her. But when Sebastian was saved by Jacob in the river, he became a real believer in Jacob… So Linn, still doubting it all, she went to him as her mother was dying, and asked him again. Initially he lied again, but ultimately he relented and went to her bed in the hospital. And there she asked him, one last time, what did the note say? And he told her what she had written on the note all those years ago – and it was the name “Linn.”
Why is it significant what was on the note at all? Why is the name significant? Well, think about it. Linn went to join the cult to break Sebastian. But Sebastian was the one that broke Linn. She admitted to him that she didn’t believe him, that the cult was a sham. But the big reveal that Sebastian pulled out of her was that Linn was jealous of the love her mother had for her dead father. She felt abandoned by that love. And she ultimately didn’t want her mother chasing after death, and her dead husband, but rather she wanted her to focus on treatments and getting better. But Allie was giving up.
Allie had written their daughter’s name on the note. He had said he wanted to name their child if it was a boy, but that she should if it was a girl. And when Linn realized what was on the note, she realized that her mother loved her dearly. And better, she knew that her father loved her similarly. That though they were magically in love with each other, they also were focused on her as well. It should have been a transformative realization for her after all the trauma of chasing after her mother’s love via cults, through Jacob, etc.
German Series Souls is Your Next New Favorite Show
Some people, I think, get caught up in the idea that this movie is a sci-fi sort of groundhog’s day… and it’s really not. It’s a movie about grief, and the sweltering insanity that comes from dying emotionally with the loss of a loved one. And Souls makes this clear because we watch as Allie just had to make a conscious choice to move on. She had to intentionally leave the grief for her own daughter. But still she continued to get dragged back into it… over and over again. She couldn’t find a way to break out of it, even though the loop had stopped. It still was going. Right? It’s a show about grief. Got it? Grief. Trust me on this one.
Looking for other similar shows to Souls? Try out, The OA, The Discovery, or it might also be like Severance??
Edited by: CY
