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troperville

This is a "Wild Mass Guess" entry, where we pull out all the sanity stops on theorizing. The regular entry on this topic is elsewhere. Please see this programme note.

Dead Like Me

The Reapers work for a Post-Singularity society.

The future people are retrieving people at the moment of death via the Reapers. The whole "soul removing" bit is Brain Uploading to their internal storage. The manifestations we see of these minds are simply avatars projected into the minds of the Reapers. The "un-versions" of the Reapers are holograms designed to prevent them from being recognized. The "lights" are a manifestation of the person being transferred to the future. The Reapers aren't told (or paid) because the future people have a very strong temporal prime directive.

So how do they "upload the minds" of the people who are already dead (like the guy who unexpectedly got smashed by a pane of glass, or the guy who was stuck with his body all the way to the morgue)?
- Probably just scan the dead brain, and take a detailed 3D image of it, allowing the future people to reconstruct a decent replica of the person's mind from how their brain worked. This explains how they can get minds from people who are already dead, but also why it'd be much easier if they're still alive(i.e. Reconstruction from a dead brain is probably a bitch to do).
Read Surface Detail to see why I hope this is wrong.

The Reapers' bosses have a sick sense of humor.

Examples 1.01 to 1.93: Everything about the Gravelings (an explosion during a bank robbery and an attempted hit, and the only person to die just got his paycheck and slipped on a banana peel, the stacking on their day off seems to be a result of an ingrained compulsion to make unlikely things happen). Example 2: The girl's Lights in The Pilot (George tries to use the "you have to go home from the carnival at the end of the day despite wanting to ride the roller coaster forever" analogy from the pilot and the Lights are in the form of a carnival).

Dead Like Me takes place in the same universe as Final Destination

Overly complicated deaths? Disproportionate revenge for saving the lives of those meant to die? Honestly, there's probably a pack of reapers chasing after the survivors at all times, trying to pop their souls again.

Honestly this is about the only explanation that makes sense. A Reaper either avoided the appointment, flaked, or deliberately saved the victims. The rest of the movies are the designated Reapers trying to catch up.
- And it gives the Gravelings free reign to be as sadistic and creative as they want to be.

The last person Rube reaped before Ascending To A Higher Plane Of Existence, who became a new reaper as a result, was Kiffany.

We know that the last person who's soul a reaper takes becomes a reaper themselves. Assuming that George's experience as a new reaper is typical, new reapers get taken into the group that the former reaper was a part of. Whoever Rube reaped wasn't. The rule about reapers staying away from people they knew in life would explain that, but only if it was someone who knew the group in life.

They became a Reaper.

You know that character that you loved? The one who died? The one who didn't return/ascend/become undead? That's because they became a Reaper. The reason why they didn't return to tell their friends and family to move on or anything, is because you can't, obviously.

For example, the reason why Winifred Burkle's soul can't be found in her body or the afterlife, is because she's living just down the road.
- Anyone else want to see George interact with the horseman Death

Oscar the cat

is a Reaper.

Just think about it. Knows about deaths in advance? Check. Touches the soon-to-be-dead? Check. Oscar is clearly working for the Terminal Diseases Division. There is a human who reaps pets, so why couldn't there be a pet who reaps humans? Besides, being a cat seems to be a great camouflage. There's only one question left to answer: Should I be afraid of Gravelings now?

The group is misinformed (by the assumptions of Rube or their predecessors, most likely) that everyone needs to be physically reaped.

Only the people who land on the cross-seams of the pattern need to be reaped. When someone who needs to be reaped isn't, the pattern starts to fall apart until the first person is reaped and the pattern can reassert itself or put an hem around the hole. Some groups happen to have a higher rate of local, categorical deaths reaped than others, and other groups may only reap a couple of people out of every hundred in their category. It all depends on the local lines and flaws in the pattern (it's even possible that the more times an attempt at reaping aversion has happened in the area, the higher the rate of reaping necessary, as the universe can't take care of things outside of its original pattern and the reapers need to reap anyone in the current pattern that the original pattern didn't cover, as exemplified in the episode where all of the victims of the faulty exercise band were reaped after George failed to let its producer die).

George is favored by the Gravelings because they chose her to command them.

Gravelings are souls that have "gone bad"; we see this with Ray. Even Reapers can't normally see them except in the corners of their eyes, but George has been able to see them since childhood. The movie ends with her promotion to head of her cell of Reapers. Dealing with the problems of her new position will give her the training in bullshit-wrangling she needs to eventually be put in charge of commanding the Gravelings. Being that Gravelings are obnoxious turds most of the time, of course they would choose a Deadpan Snarker of epic proportions to one day be their boss.

The real reason Trip never called George back is not because he's scum, but because he discovered that "George Lass" was dead.

With how crazy and suspicious Trip's sister was, she probably did a background check on the name "George Lass" and discovered that she had died in a freak aerospace accident. She would have of course informed her brother, causing him to believe that the girl he'd just slept with was some shady person using a dead girl's name. This would've freaked him out enough to never want to contact her again.

the tree guy in episode 3 season 1 asended to the realm of platonic forms

just look at all the weird symbols

Mason is a Time Lord.

Two reasons for this one:

Every WMG page needs a Time Lord theory, and
Seriously, look at the guy. It's like Callum Blue and David Tennant were separated at birth.
- Mason is Fitz Kreiner in an alternate reality where the Doctor never picked him up.
  - The only problem is Fitz is much more intelligent than Mason. Fitz is about averagely intelligent, and occasionally rather intellectual. Mason is hilariously clueless. But that could easily be explained by Mason's drug abuse and self-trepanation, or that having not ever met the Doctor, Fitz would be left with an untreated brain slug.

Rube gave Mason a purple post-it to mess with him.

He's been shown to have more than enough yellow post-it notes in his apartment, and I'm sure Rube does little things every so often to mess with his team of reapers so he doesn't get bored.