Ending interpretation?

[Baby]

I would like to talk with people who ended game already. (It was amazing, btw!)
Did Fran really kill her parents? If she did, she was mentally unstable, I guess? Was she living in asylum before? (I'm talking about the part with small Fran) Is kitty dead (body in coffin)? :( Why he couldn't talk anymore? Did she die in the ending? Are aunt Grace and dr Oswald dead?
And please, don't say things like "you will have to answer it yourself", my curiosity is hungry for answers :(

[Flechita]

My theory is that... WARNING, HEAVY SPOILERS:

If you remember what happens in the first chapter and have read the book of Dr. Leon and think about it carefully, you will find how the realities are kind of bound together, and how this bound affects Fran's perception of reality. But first we have to go back to the very first moments of the first chapter. Do you remember the revolver inside the nurse's desk? And the revolver that Dr. Oswald used to shoot Fran near the ending of the final chapter? Coincidence? I think not! And you will know why if we keep digging in these little details... Remember about the cake and pastries on the table inside the twins house in the second chapter? And what about the surprise party with Itward in the fourth chapter? Can you start seeing what's going on there? Let's be a little more specific, just in case...

Mother Mabuka, ruler of the Fifth Realm, what an interesting name, Mabuka... Did you know that Mabuka means "opened" in Cebuano language? Check for yourself if you wish[translate.google.es].
This language is spoken in a wide area of the Philippines, and one of the islands in this zone[upload.wikimedia.org] (a small one around the middle), quite reminds of the layout of Ithersta, the second reality, and their language, the Ithernish, shares some phonetical similarities with the Cebuano. But of course, this seems too odd to be intented, and may be just a coincidence, but who knows! (I don't really think it's a coincidence tbh.) Going a few lines back, if Mabuka's name actually means "opened", this would be a clear reference in the final chapter about how Mabuka opens her heart to let Fran go inside. But is Fran the only one being who Mabuka opened her heart to? Let's go back to Dr. Leon's book. Do you remember the page where it says "Mother Mabuka is letting me go.", and the fact that the final pages of said book are missing? Who did tear them apart and why? Was it Dr. Leon himself?

As you know may already know, it's been revealed that Dr. Leon worked at the Osward Asylum at some point and was perhaps even a leading member of the research team. The Fran from the Ultrareality also mentions him having come and visited her and explaining things to her about the ultrareality. Among these things is that you must be broken to enter the ultrareality. That being said, like all of the abnormal creatures Fran sees, Remor may not even truly exist at all, and may just be a product of Fran's insanity, caused by being experimented on by Dr. Oswald, simply acting as an avatar of Fran's own mad despair. Remor is the son of Mabuka, the son of the "opened heart", who opened her heart to Fran, but apparently also opened her heart to Dr. Leon before, who seems to have worked alongside Dr. Oswald at some point. Can you now see where all this is going? Let's sum it all up...

So, it's obvious that Fran has some kind of mental illness. We play the game inside Fran's point of view, so sometimes may be hard to tell what is real and what is result of Fran's madness. The Duotine is the special drug that makes Fran access the Ultrareality, and perceive various kinds of hallucionations. Hallucinations are entities that appear in many different forms throughout the game. They most prevalently contain blood, gore, mutilated or dead animals, mutilated or dead people, horrifying creatures, and horrifying versions of Fran herself. While often these versions of her are dead sometimes they are alive and can talk or at least seem to have thoughts of their own. At first these hallucinations only occur when Fran takes the modified version of Duotine, but later in the game they flash in and out of existence even when she is not on her medication. Whether these occurrences are really hallucinations or simply an instance of Fran entering the Ultrareality or simply another reality is unknown as through out the game the lines between reality and fiction are very blurred to the point of almost being non-existent. This being said however we can be certain that the things Fran sees in Ithersta were in fact Hallucinations as she was no longer under the effects of Duotine in this chapter of the game.

Now let's get back to the beginning. Do you remember the revolver? Do you remember the cake and the pastries? Do you remember the meaning of the name of Mabuka? Do you remember how the Duotine makes Fran see hallucinations? Do you understand now what happened to the missing pages from Dr. Leon's book? If you can't see it yet, let's carefully remember the very final words at the end of the game... "Between guilt and fear, I choose happiness." Can you guess it on your own already? No? Take 5 minutes to think carefully about it again, read all again if necesary, you have already beaten the game, and you'll feel more rewarded if you are able to guess the real meaning of the ending on your own, but if you can't, here's the answer: LAST WARNING, HEAVY SPOILER, GO AHEAD TO REVEAL THE TRUTH:Mr. Midnight is a lovely cat. You should adopt a cat now if you don't already have one.

[Stigma]

Btw, regarding that we're told that Fran's parents had been sliced into little pieces. Nobody seems to regard the fact that their bodies seems to be completely intact in their graves..
And yes, adopt a cat!

[a gigglepuss!]

Everyone who thinks Fran actually killed her parents without supernatural assitance is an idiot.

How is a does a child have the strength to cleave her parents all the way through in one cut, (mentioned in the newspaper clipping that they were cleanly sliced in two and died instantly) with a KITCHEN KNIFE, while both are in the same room, and before either of them can react.

If this is truly what you believe, you are the one with mental problems and/or deficiencies.

[gallifrey]

Originally posted by a gigglepuss!:

Everyone who thinks Fran actually killed her parents without supernatural assitance is an idiot.

How is a does a child have the strength to cleave her parents all the way through in one cut, (mentioned in the newspaper clipping that they were cleanly sliced in two and died instantly) with a KITCHEN KNIFE, while both are in the same room, and before either of them can react.

If this is truly what you believe, you are the one with mental problems and/or deficiencies.

As said above, the bodies in the graves were completely intact. Which means either the bodies were not Fran's parents, or more likely, the story in the newspaper wasn't true. We're seeing the story from Fran's point of view, and she's clearly unstable and has difficulties separating reality from imagination. I believe Fran killed her parents. I don't believe she actually chopped them up like that. That's her imagination running away with her, to make it into a story that's easier to swallow than to face up to what really happened. I don't think there's anything supernatural in the story.

[Stigma]

Originally posted by gallifrey:

Originally posted by a gigglepuss!:

Everyone who thinks Fran actually killed her parents without supernatural assitance is an idiot.

How is a does a child have the strength to cleave her parents all the way through in one cut, (mentioned in the newspaper clipping that they were cleanly sliced in two and died instantly) with a KITCHEN KNIFE, while both are in the same room, and before either of them can react.

If this is truly what you believe, you are the one with mental problems and/or deficiencies.

As said above, the bodies in the graves were completely intact. Which means either the bodies were not Fran's parents, or more likely, the story in the newspaper wasn't true. We're seeing the story from Fran's point of view, and she's clearly unstable and has difficulties separating reality from imagination. I believe Fran killed her parents. I don't believe she actually chopped them up like that. That's her imagination running away with her, to make it into a story that's easier to swallow than to face up to what really happened. I don't think there's anything supernatural in the story.

Agreed. Fran has mental problems and is a classic case of The Unreliable Narrator. And there's probably nothing supernatural going on in this game

[thisbird]

Here's my theory:

Oswald's experiments on twins are real. He discovers Grace and Fran's mother and experiments on both them and Clara and Mia. He sets his sights on Fran while she's still in the womb and begins experimenting on Fran when she's still very small, explaining the scene when we see a much younger Fran in the mental hospital, already undergoing treatment.

Her parents try to get her away from Oswald, but Grace is still working with him.

While babysitting Fran the night before Fran's parents die, Aunt Grace drugs Fran. Fran has a mental break and kills her parents. (Remor is a split in her personality, not an actual creature. He appears when Fran discovers something that is too close to the truth. Here, it's that she's killed her parents.)

She runs away from the house, and two people involved in the experiments (Oswald and a nurse?) find her and fake her death so that they can continue their experiments.

She stays at the asylum for several months (check the dates on the calendars and graves), at which point the game starts. Every time she takes the pills, she hallucinates. The other children, who are also being given the fake Duotine, also hallucinate. (Please note: Only the children that Fran seems closest to claim to have seen or heard what Fran sees. This is because she told them about it. The children she doesn't know - the king, for instance - has a different set of delusions.)

Fran, believing that someone else has killed her parents and that her cat is still alive, goes in search of the killer and the cat. She escapes the asylum (again, Remor appears with an unpleasant truth, right after the fake Duotine is found). Fran vanishes into the maze, finding the well where the doctors dumped the corpses of Mia and Clara.

She falls from the bridge while attempting to go home and spends all of the chapter Vegetative State in an actual vegetative state, dreaming Ithersta.

When she wakes, she bikes home and is found by Dr Deern. They actually go to the cemetery and check the graves, discovering that Mr. Midnight is dead and Fran's death was faked. Fran has another mental break, and Remor appears when she can't handle the truth (again).

Fran makes it home and her Aunt Grace does in fact tie her to the bed. By this point, she is dangerously unhinged and her "reality" is not reliable, but some points that are important to note are the details in her room. All of the creatures and places on her journey appear in her toys and decor. It's easy to imagine that a child's hallucinations would be of things a child knows, and you see the trappings of Ithersta everywhere.

Somehow, she makes it back to the asylum. Possibly, she just calls and makes an appointment.

While there, the doctor brings up her parents' murder point blank (again, Remor is present for a truth that she can't handle).

Meanwhile, Oswald, Grace, and the nurses have restrained Dr. Deern because he's learned too much. Fran wakes him with a red liquid that contains the same ingredient as her pills. Although he's seen nothing of her hallucinations before, he begins to see them after he's been drugged.

Fran loses it and attacks her aunt; to stop her, Oswald shoots her. As before, when she falls into a vegetative state, she dreams of Ithersta. Presumably, she dies at the game's end.

[gallifrey]

That's exactly how I see the story too! It's nice to replay it and look at it from a supernatural angle too, but for me what really happened is the interpretation above.

As a side note, I also think it's likely that Fran had a twin in the womb who died as a result of the experiments. A lot of the images she sees relate to this (the dead baby still attached to the umbilical cord on the skeleton). And it could be why Oswald is so extremely interested in her for his experiements, as the twin daughter of a twin mother.

I also don't think Fran was as close and happy with her parents as the animation at the beginning suggests. The writing on the wall "Daddy was not there Mummy would not care" seems to back this up. Possibly because they agreed to have her experiemented on. Even though they took her out of the hospital eventually, Fran was already bitter about it by that point, which is her motive for murder. (Even though she had been drugged, the idea of murder must've come from some part of her)

[Namikka🏳️‍🌈]

(Sorry if this has been discussed a lot, I just finished and can get through all 8 pages before throwing in my ponderings.)

First, some meta-♥♥♥♥♥: My feeling is that most of what's happening is something the majority wouldn't call reality. I think the game has other stories (and parts that are there just to make the game interesting) to tell then the obvious one of Fran's adventure, and I think there's a lot of play with the boundaries of what *is* real - as in, what kind of experiences can you dismiss because others don't experience them. Eg. if a person firmly believes in ghosts, then they are part of their perception of reality - in their world, these are facts. Almost everyone agrees upon laws of physics, but we can't for example tell how someone sees colours. After hallucinations a person might realize it wasn't real in the sense that other people experienced it in a very different way - still, their own experience doesn't change, but it's still part of their memory.

"Vegetative state" was a Chapter name that got me thinking that Fran was still in the hospital, maybe in a drug induced coma. A big part of me thinks that Fran was a deeply disturbed child (or an adult?) and there wasn't much magic going on outside her own reality. As someone who has had a lot of mental issues (btw I'm not the actual account holder but we live in the same flat and share) I can tell that some side-effects can be seriously ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up, and others the opposite. I also found the twin theme a classic metaphor for split personality or some other personality disorder caused by adamant denial, maybe sides of Fran, one denying the problems and other trying to cope - if Itward was the one who put them together and was revealed to be a good guy, maybe that was an attempt to mend those two parts into one again. Just before the end in the hallway to the doctor's office there's a painting of a brain and Fran wonders "why does a brain have two sides".

I don't think Fran killed her parents, at least not if she really was a child (occult, clean cuts etc), maybe there was some other trauma, them leaving her behind to live with Grace or dying otherwise in a way that Fran blamed herself. I think it was mostly an elaborate fantasyworld. Alice as a schoolfriend was a hint to that direction too. Nearing the end of the game Dr Deern seemed to be a part of Fran's mind trying to reason with her more gently than the real Dr had in the beginning. I think the ending might've been 1) Fran still in the hospital but accepting the fantasies as her only reality 2) lobotomy, considering the time period 3) suicide. I think the 1st is the best, or atleast I like it the best.

[Daria Morgendorffer]

Oh f***

[Daria Morgendorffer]

Aww s***....

[apetala]

Im going through a second play through of the game and here's my two cents:

We see two girls in the basement of the mental asylum, both with clear operation scars on their heads. When we use the pills, we see the name "ITWARD" on the wall. This ties in heavily with the idea that these girls are the real Clara and Mia, and they've clearly been through a traumatic operation of sorts. When Fran meets the girls again in the well, they're sewn together, two heads on one body. Pictures in the house show that the girls were once separate beings. There's a girl's ghost who looks a lot like the twin girls in the photo, and a body thats been decapitated on the floor of the house.

I think the game is heavily hinting that the original doctor, possibly Oswald, working on his study of the pineal gland and the 'seat of the soul', did an operation on the two girls in effect combining their two souls together. He essentially took the 'soul' of one twin, and placed it in the head of the other twin. Hence when Fran sees them in the well, we see two heads in one body. We also see the ghost of one of the girls, possibly because her physical body is essentially vacant now, or her soul has been split in two. It could explain why the spell to split the girls back apart requires another head. Clara and Mia's operation worked to combine their consciousness, albeit not well or for long. Oswald got excited that his research was paying off, and needed a new set of twin test subjects.

I think that Fran had a twin, who was separated very early on, with one twin growing up in the asylum, apart from her family, and the other who stayed with her parents. They eventually re-united, though in Fran's memories she sees the this other twin as "Mr. Midnight". Mr. Midnight, Fran's twin in the asylum, kills her parents because of the betrayal? She knew they didn't love her? And Fran, shocked at what she saw, ran out, and was actually found by the people of the asylum later, who assumed she was the other committed twin.

The twin who killed her parents was found by Aunt Grace, called a traitor, and was shot and killed by Oswald, who operated on her, and placed her 'soul' into Frans. Her body was found later, assumed to be frozen to death? And buried with her parents.

Fran is now unable to tell apart her memories from the asylum twin's memories, or tell their personalities apart. But she does know in her own shattered way, that this twin, Mr. Midnight is important to her and that they should never be apart. When she looks at the coffin that should have Fran, she sees instead a cat's skeleton--her twin.

This could tie into how Fran is able to speak to little Fran, but has no memory of Ithersta, Palontras or Itward beforehand in the game. She receives this information, bit by bit, through the subconcious they share together. Ithersta is more of Fran's reality that is fed by her twin's subconscious, while Ultrareality with Mabuka is more of the asylum's twin. It would explain the line we see later in the game where "death is merely a state of mind" because both twins consciousness carries on, albeit weirdly in one girl.

My interpretation is that while Fran is hallucinating to do so, the realities she encounters are real. The dominant twin personality dictates that she has a human form, (Fran, Clara) while the twin transplanted on and is more rooted in subconscious takes on an animal, instinctive form. (Mr. Midnight, the toad you see outside the window who is in the same area as the twin ghost.

[maxinerobbins]

I kind of feel like people are taking the "reality" approach to their theories a little too hard. My personal interpretation of the game is the entire journey is Fran attempting to cope with her parent's death. I don't think she is entirely nuts, but she does have a mental disorder. That of course makes perfect sense, since she saw her parents being murdered. Keep in mind that Fran is also ten, so a lot of the fantastical places she goes to (Ithersta, in particular) are her escape from the horrible reality she has in the asylum. If you think about the first stages of grieving, often horrible depression and recurring thoughts about the deceased come first. Chapter 1 especially deals with an intese amount of gore and many of her hallucinations include her parents or their deaths. For example, the first hallucination she has when trying out her pills in Dr. Deern's office are her parent's heads falling from the sky in mass numbers. Chapter 2 (with the bugs) is the next stage of grieving, when a person feels lost after a loved one has died. Fran is wandering the forest looking for Mr. Midnight, and while she does meet many nice creatures (Antonio, the talking heads, the rat), she is completely focused on finding Mr. Midnight in hopes of feeling better.

In the next chapter with the twins, Fran finally finds Mr. Midnight which she desperately needed to feel better. I believe Mr. Midnight is Fran's manifestation of hope and happiness throughout the whole game. When she finds him, Fran still feels lost but not hopeless. She is able to create a way to escape the clutches of the girls, but upsets herself again because she did not realize her potion would kill the girls. Even though the girls were evil, this deeply impacts Fran because she doesn't want to experience what happened to her parents again. This is also why I don't believe she actually killed her parents.

In the Ithersta chapter, I believe this is Fran going into a mental breakdown after she killed the girls and had not fully finished grieving her parents. Remor (who I believe represents her guilt), literally causes her to fall to her death, but to save herself she made her body into a hollow shell, as Mr. Midnight put it. Oftentimes when people struggle with depression or the death of a loved one, they will turn into a hollow shell of who they used to be in order to survive. The wonderful root and bug people of Ithersta represent the support and love people get from their friends and family when they are suffering from depression or the death of someone. Palontras, after having a kind and understanding conversation with Fran, makes Fran's hollow body bloom with beautiful foliage and she is able to walk and take a human form again. I believe this is the point where Fran begins to forgive herself for what happened to her parents, because it was not her fault. However, she has not fully forgiven herself for what happened to the twins because they reoccur in many of her upcoming hallucinations. I believe the wizard's scavenger hunt was the personal checklist that Fran needed in order to fully recover and return to her reality. She needed to overcome her remaining thoughts of guilt in order to fully recover from the guilt and the death of her parents. I think this because a hallucination would pop up every time before finding a necessary item on the list, and while they did impact Fran, she managed to overcome it with the help of Mr. Midnight and was able to complete her quest.

When Fran returns to the real world, she finally encounters Itward, who I believe represents her inner determination. Itward was a reoccurring character throughout the game up until this point, but you did not know if he was good or bad. However, everything he did helped you progress through the game. When someone is depressed or grieving, there is always an inner part of them that wants to get through the hard times and find happiness whether they acknowledge it or not. Itward is that manifestation for Fran, and now that Fran has forgiven herself and has hope on her side, Itward has officially introduced himself. I also believe it was Itward that originally switched her pills to make her hallucinate, because if she had not began the journey of grieving, Fran would not have ever become a better person and therefore could not ever become healthy. To further prove that Itward is the manifestation of determination, he instructs Fran to fix multiple components of his hand-built ship on her own. Any normal person would freak out if they had to fix something so complex, but Fran is confident that she can do it and does it quickly. Without determination, Fran most likely could not finish those tasks. It is also determination (Itward and his ship) that gets her back to Aunt Grace's house.

When the kamala attacks the ship, Fran finally has the courage to fight against it and wins. I believe this is extremely symbolic. This shows that Fran is literally "overcoming her demons", thanks to friends like Mr. Midnight, Itward, Palontras, etc.

Fran returning to her home made me suspicious that something was off when the key to the house couldn't be found. While I would still like to know what happened to the key, this may symbolize Fran's mind beginning to change. She has been away from home for so long that home doesn't feel as much like home as it originally did. I believe when Dr. Deern returns to find Fran it represents one of the final stages of grieving, when the immense emotions begin to fade and the analytical inner process begins. Once Fran realized it was not her fault, she began looking for answers as to who killed her parents. People grieving a sudden death often will ask why the deceased had to die the way they did, or when they did, or how, etc. When the doctor and Fran dig up her parent's graves, Fran finally comes face to face with the fact that they are dead. She seems quite accepting of this fact, and that most likely is because she has almost finished the grieving process. However, her subconscious guilt rises back up after seeing their dead bodies and Remor returns. I believe he took Dr. Deern first because the doctor himself has immense guilt about digging up Fran's parents with her. It is a rather messed up thing to do with a ten year old. Oftentimes, visiting a loved one's grave will cause many emotions to resurface for a short period of time. Fran's guilt returns, and Remor takes her to the final chapter to wrestle with her feelings one last time.

The final chapter represents the long and confusing process of fully grieving. There are many doors and many spiralling, wacky paths to walk before coming face to face with her feelings. While she indeed has forgiven herself, Fran must confront Remor face to face fully and ask him "Why". Why does she feel this way still? Why had he been so cruel and horrible to her specifically? I believe the waiting room of the "doctor's office" represents the sheer amount of time, often years, that it takes to fully grieve. Then Fran was finally able to confront Remor without him trying to kill her, most likely because she has put in the time and effort to understand her feelings. He does, however, try once more to convince her that she had killed her parents herself. But because Fran had forgiven herself and understood her own feelings, she knew he was deceiving her.

I believe she finally had discovered who killed her parents when Dr. Oswald and Aunt Grace came out. If I remember correctly, Grace explicity explained how Oswald had experimented on her mother and herself, and now had wanted to experiment on Fran. However, Fran was never made aware of this, which leads me to believe that Fran's parents had prevented Oswald from doing so. This lead Grace to kill the parents in order to put Fran in Oswald's asylum. When Grace thought Fran was ready to be experimented on, she attempted to take her out of the asylum, but Dr. Deern refused to discharge her. Dr. Deern, in the end, had Fran's best interest at heart which is why he was strapped up and possessed by Mabuka. He was being punished for looking out for her. The one thing I still want to know is why Grace continuously called Mr. Midnight a traitor, but I'm assuming it has something to do with him trying to save Fran from her own horrible thoughts.

When Grace throws Mr. Midnight into the abyss, I believe Fran goes crazy and tries to kill her because Grace had literally killed Fran's hope in one fell swoop. When Oswald shoots Fran, it represents Fran dying from her hopelessness. The immediate depression resulting in her loss of hope and her friend is literally killing her, but then her friends arrive. With the support of Itward, Palontras, and the saved Mr. Midnight, Fran is saved. Just as when it seems like there is no hope when you have depression, things will always get better with support and love. "You are never dead as long as you have love in your heart". Dr. Deern, however, still has his own demons he needs to address. Back when he was discussing his dad and the knives in the car with Fran, you could see a kabala behind him. The presence of unresolved emotions allows Mabuka to control him, and the only way he can be saved is if his memory is wiped of everything that had happened. Dr. Deern needs to heal himself, and he is the only one who can do it.

Fran, having fully conquered her emotions and has forgiven herself, rides off on Palontras and her other friends in a happy ending. Remor, however, is never fully destroyed. That does symbolize that guilt will always be a part of everyone, but if you are at peace with yourself it cannot hurt you.

That is my interpretation of Fran Bow. Sorry it's long, but the game is so detailed and complex it has to be!

[this guy]

ok check this out

Itward: Death (even leads fran to her death so she can be with him for eternity)
Tree King: God
Flying healing fury guy: God's Angel
Remor: Obviously Satan (tempting fran into suicide which is one of the biggest sins)
Mr. Midnight: I'm not sure about this one but everytime fran kills something(beetlepig twins aunt grace) its in the name of Mr. Midnight so possibly he symbolizes murder in which case i think fran is schitzofranic. This would also explain why aunt grace calls the cat traitor.
Makuba:(no idea she eally doesn't seem that evil she's more just all knowing like an oracle i kinda get a mother Earth vibe from her oddly)

One thing I can say for sure is Fran really does die. Many asylums are like hell and in death she can truly be free. Whatever the truth is she does find happiness n thats all that matters

This game does a good job at telling two stories (like the shining) but only letting you pick one(unlike the shining) :)

Either way love these discussions

[Shady_Zed]

Ok... after reading all 8 commentary pages, I would like to add my 2 Euro-Cent of opinion too.

IMHO, alas this discussion will lead nowhere, because the creators seem to have PURPOSELY left out mandatory hints that would let us put all the pieces together. That's why we have so many speculations here, we are all just guessing wildly, without anything to really back it up. Personally I think it a very bad thing to leave the player 'hanging' in the end and nothing is really resolved.

Without mandatory hints, basically everything is possible, including Fran being in a coma the whole time and dreaming it ALL up (since the game would be totally meaningless then, I refuse to believe that), or Mr. Midnight could be Fran's "Alternate Personality", her "only friend"... and when their parents tried to 'get rid' of that alternate personality (aka trying to 'cure her' somehow), she defended herself by killing them (and maybe her real cat too). Then later in the forest, the alternate personality 'disappeared' (because Fran could not stand the memories of her dead parents) and thus basically 'betrayed her by leaving her alone. This would also explain why she wears a hat that looks like a cat's head when she wakes up in the house of the twin sisters, why she can talk to her 'cat' and why she attacks Aunt Grace when she tries to 'get rid' of the cat (aka Fran's 'madness') again at the end of chapter five.

But wait, no true clues hinting in that direction either... so it's again only speculation. :/ I really think it's time the creators step in at this point and post some explanation...

Apart from that, nobody seems to have noticed yet that the presumed day of the murder (July 21, 1944, as it was written on the graves) is not a Monday but a Friday. Also, they did not have color television yet back in 1944 (first color broadcast was in 1951), tone-dialing push-button telephones (like the one Fran
uses to make an appointment) were not available before the end of 1963, and Polaroid photos that eject from the front of the camera (like the one that shows Fran with her parents and aunt) were first introduced in 1972. Was that just 'goofing up' or are these 'hidden clues'?

[Daria Morgendorffer]

World war 2 was happening at the time you know