After a meteor strike and some scientific mumbo-jumbo, Felix Menzies wakes up in a jail cell on the day before his execution for murdering the man he wrongly thought was his wife’s lover—an act he doesn’t remember—, and then he starts waking up on each previous morning, whereupon he begins to think he can cheat Destiny by not murdering the guy in the first place.

In this tragic tale, Doug returns to the lakeshore where a decade before, at age twelve, he built sandcastles with Tally, his first love.

On a snowy November evening during his train commute home from New York City, John Daly falls asleep and, perhaps in a dream, sees a simpler life with bands playing in the bandstand, people riding penny farthings through the park, and kids fishin’ at their fishin’ holes the 1888 summertime of idyllic Willoughby.

The TV adaptation of Bradbury’s “The Lake” focuses more on the adult man, who’s now thirty-something Doug, but the story structure and pathos of his lost childhood love remain intact.

Note to self: When you’re a detective having second thoughts about stealing that gold from a drug bust, don’t express your thoughts to your partner who might give you a shotgun blast to the face, whereupon time will momentarily freeze and you will be recruited to an understaffed supernatural police department. Apart from time freezing, there are no time phenomena in this adaptation of the earlier comic book miniseries.

After thirty-something Nora Seed kills herself, she arrives as a possibly metaphorical library with an infinite number of books containing her possible lives, each one of which she may try out, always starting on the night of her suicide.

For me, the depiction of Nora’s suicidal ideation and eventual killing of herself were dismissive of those who face depression every day, and the outcome was fictionally romanticized in a way that may induce suicide rather than showing understanding and encouragement to seek out help when life is dark. I don’t see this as intentional by the author.