Part 4 had Mike fleeing into the desert after discovering a sphere in his head. Reggie follows him. The Tall Man appears to Mike and basically tells him that he is becoming like him. I always assumed that Mike was being primed to be the "next Tall Man" for when the Tall Man's current form wears out. Mike wants to kill the Tall Man, and decides that the best way to do so is to attempt suicide in order to bring the Tall Man out of the woodwork (he knows the TM wants him alive) then use his new sphere powers to kill him. He tries it but finds himself under TM's power and very nearly shakes TM's hand (which would have sealed his Faustian deal). He pulls away and uses his new power to summon a spacegate and escape to another dimension. Here, he finds his brother who takes him back to where the TM began - he meets a gentle, kind old mortician called Jebediah Morningside who is basically the Tall Man before he became the Tall Man.
Jebediah lives in the 19th century and is obsessed with life and death, he applies the disciplines of science and alchemy to the problem and comes to discover (possibly via extradimensional contact) how to maniplulate time and space. He builds the first spacegate after discovering that the key to distorting space was the use of precise vibrations. Mike tries to kill Jebediah in order to stop the Tall Man from being created, but fails. We see Jebediah travel through his space gate as a gentle old man, but when he comes back, he is the Tall Man and is holding a sphere. In his own words "the game begins". Where he went and what happened to turn him is never revealed.
Jody, Mike's brother, begins to show signs of being under the Tall Man's power.
Meanwhile, on the highway in the present day, Reggie fights various monsters constructed by the TM to kill him, including a zombie cop and a beautiful woman with death spheres for tits. During his battle with sphere tits, he discoverers that the tone of his tuning fork has a detrimental effect on the TMs minions (vibrations, remember?).
Mike comes back to the present and uses his psych powers to turn the hearse he travelled in into some kind of makeshift weapon. He is reunited with Reggie. During their reunion, Mike whispers to Reggie not to trust Jody. Reggie secretively hands Mike the tuning fork.
Mike is taken through the spacegate to a huge mortuary in another dimension. Jody and the TM try to extract the sphere from his head but he manages to freeze them in time using the tuning fork. He kills Jody, who bleeds yellow ooze (he's a minion) and escapes the Tall Man back to where he left Reggie. The Tall Man follows but Mike uses his super weapon to fire makeshift death spheres at the Tall Man and then blows him up with a homemade explosive device.
Another Tall Man comes through the gate, but this one seems different somehow, like he is in a trance. He takes the sphere from Mikes head and leaves with it back through the gate. Mike, somehow still alive, tells Reggie he is dying before entering into an internal catatonic world where he is still a child. Reggie promises to save him somehow, grabs his gun, and runs through the gate after the Tall Man.
My theory is this: the "second" Tall Man that came through the gate in a trancelike state was Jebediah, being controlled by the sphere in Mike's head. This is why he is carrying the sphere and seems dazed when he returns to the 19th century. It's a perfect circle, and actually, although Reggie doesn't realise it... Mike wins - he killed the Tall Man in 1998, and then the sphere in his head creates the Tall Man back in 18-something. So you see, the Tall Man's existence is confined between these two dates, he can never succeed in destroying the world because his birth and death are linked in an infinite feedback loop.
That make any sense? :P
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. [click for more]
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Originally Posted by DubiousComforts
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