I'm really glad about the fact that Ana was featured on Chef's Table.
Of course, one may always criticize that what she's doing there isn't a lot different from what so many other restaurants are trying to do, in terms of local ingredients and respect towards the environment.
But I see her from a little different perspective.
Not only was this episode much more pleasing than a lot of the others from a viewer's perspective, but it was her character that made it even more so.
In this episode, I see two really different aspects that work so great together.
For one, there's the fact that she was more or less forced to take over the kitchen and learn virtually everything on her own, in a more or less unknown conservative country scarred by communism, with a quasi non-existent culinary history.
And then there's this spark of her, this unexpected entrepreneurial sense and her craving for freedom and the expression of creativity.
And somehow, God knows how, over a long course with a lot of rough patches, she managed to combine all that and lift both herself and her restaurant up to a level that's really hard to beat.
With a little outside help, she managed to place herself onto the international map of gastronomic highlights and give Slovenia some sense of gastronomic identity.
Doing all this while preserving her being down to earth and continuing this journey really deserves all of the respect there is. And I'm really looking forward to seeing how she and her husband develop themselves even further over the next years.
This was probably the kind of ending I least expected, due to it being just so obvious and somewhat uncreative.
I haven't read the book, therefore I can't say a think about the storyline or the ending, for that matter.
But there were so many chances where one could've built in a couple of awesome plot twists that would've made the entire thing not only a whole lot more enjoyable, but much more fitting to the whole complex thing that the concept of time travel is.
For example: Since they set the focus so heavily on the fact that time doesn't want itself to be changed, they could've easily changed the storyline in a way that doesn't really change the past in such a hard way.
What if Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't the one responsible for the assassination of JFK, but Mr. Amberson himself? What if Lee Harvey Oswald was nothing more than a patsy and the FBI or whoever else was actually the one responsible for the shooting? What if, that, after changing the past in a rather impactful way, there was no way of going back through the rabbit hole, since said change dismissed the fact that the rabbit hole existed in the first place?
These are just a couple of 'what ifs' that I've asked myself at the beginning and throughout the series, 'what ifs', that I figured the writers and producers of this show also must've asked themselves when being presented with a plot that's so diverse and changeable in such numerous ways.
And, sadly, these 'what ifs' are nothing more than, well, 'what ifs', since it seems like this huge amount of possibilities was just too huge an amount for the people creating this show to actually explore them, at all.
So the actual ending itself appeared to me as nothing more than way too straight-forward, obvious and rather uncreative, running adrift to being a slightly cheesy love story ending.
