After filming - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin

Last week, Jess and I finished a Netflix documentary and, over the course of the three hours, we learned a lot before arriving at that most holy of documentary staples: the information dump at the end. You’ve all seen it before - at the end of a documentary, often on a plain black screen, the filmmakers tie up any loose ends that may be hanging after the on-screen action concludes.

 

Spotlight, for example, told you where all of the offending members of the Catholic Church ended up (Oprah voice: You get a promotion! You get a promotion!) and the countries and cities in which church abuse scandals were discovered in the wake of the investigation.

 

It got me thinking about how much we all look forward to one of those screens, filling in the blanks, updating what we’ve seen and answering our questions. So, in a completely fun and made-up exercise, let’s do a few for us.

 

The first one would come after one of Citizen founder Keith Roulston’s columns in which he minimizes the impact he feels he’s had on his community. The screen goes black. Subtle white text reads: In 2025, Keith Roulston was invested into the Order of Canada for his work as a journalist, playwright and community builder.

 

The next would be after another crowd-pleasing installment of The Chaff. The Chaff: The Play was turned into a seven-film saga by A24. It not only told the three-part story of The Chaff: The Play, but went further back, telling the story of Scott creating The Chaff, Scott’s parents creating him, his grandparents creating his parents and the very creation of life itself (directed by David Lynch).

 

Speaking of Lynch, after another lively local Pride flag debate we’d hear that he has been elected Master and Commander of the newly-amalgamated country comprised of Canada and the United States. He’d apply his transgender positivity from Twin Peaks to his policies, insisting that bigots “fix their hearts or die.” Most die and are given military-style funerals in which their coffins are draped in a Pride flag and lowered into the ground to Hedwig and The Angry Inch songs because Lynch thinks it’s funny. And it is. It’s funny.

 

After Citizen resident historian Karen Webster and Goderich-based historian David Yates unknowingly write about the same topic on the same week for their respective publications, a Jeopardy-style local history competition is organized. They match wits well into the night. Exhausted and mentally depleted, they choose to decide the contest via fistfight, despite both being non-violent and acknowledging the complicated nature of an intergender fistfight. Karen wins handily.

 

After more than a decade of emergency room closures in Clinton, the Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance drastically reverses its vaccination policy. The hospital only hires completely vaccine-free nurses. One very tired, yet endlessly energetic nurse works the hospital 24 hours a day, mainly treating smallpox with crystals, maggots and bleach. 

 

With that Gypsy Lane mess behind it, North Huron Council leans into its victory. Council renames all of Blyth’s streets with racial slurs. One councillor suggests expansion to include homophobic slurs - a report, authored by three dozen North Huron staffers, is forthcoming.

 

And so concludes another installment of Shawn’s Sense with Shawn Loughlin. When Elon Musk rounded up the world’s reporters and executed them in his ‘Liar’s Pit’, Loughlin slithered away undetected after Musk’s robots dismissed Shawn’s Sense as a collection of dumb observations of no journalistic value.