Category: Finales

Reviews of season and series finales.

Succession finale: Destined to be a failure

This finale symbolizes Succession’s ultimate problem: It never had a second idea. Succession began, stayed and finished in the board room. There was no in between for the show or any of the characters. They spent 38 episodes having the same conversation. That’s why this show can’t take a place next to The Wire or Breaking Bad in the pantheon of prestige television. It didn’t go anywhere.

We spent four seasons watching three children argue with each other about who should lead their father’s company. They didn’t say anything to each other in the final episode that they wouldn’t have said in the first. 

The whole series boiled down to one question, posed to Shiv, about Kendall: Yes or no? 

Now ask yourself one question: Was Shiv capable of voting against Kendall in the Succession premiere? The answer is yes (and we know that because she and Roman tried to position themselves against him as they bargained with Logan over adding Marcia to the Board). If she had, how would Kendall have reacted? Exactly the same way we saw him react in the finale, that’s how. There’s no journey there. No growth, no change. 

That’s just not how great shows work.

Characters in great shows react to what life throws at them and emerge different people on the other side. The Walter While we saw stumbling out of the RV in episode one was not capable of being a drug kingpin because he had yet to discover the rage and hunger for power that drove him to topple Gus Fring. That’s storytelling. Succession couldn’t or wouldn’t do that. Shiv watched her family repeatedly stab each other in the back. She watched her father die. She watched her husband betray her at work multiple times. She’s about to bring a child into a loveless marriage. And she voted the exact same way she would have before any of those things ever happened.

That’s not prestige television. It’s pathetic television.

The only scene where finale got anywhere close to letting its characters evolve came in their mom’s kitchen. For the first time in the entire series we got to see them be kids. Fuckin’ around in the kitchen at night, disobeying their mom and making fun of their goofy stepdad’s cheese; these were children. I watched this thinking okay, this is what these characters are like after the enormous weight of succeeding their father is taken away. I like it. Maybe this is what they would have been like if they were born without the silver spoon.

Did the show let them build on that as people? Nope. It was a scene that existed solely so the ultimate outcome in the boardroom would shock us.

It’s frustrating because I really think Succession deserved better. The acting never failed in this series. Not once. The dialogue was tight. The style and setting carried the world the show wanted us to see and feel. 

But its storytelling failed. The random, rambling course of its last episode shows why:

Breakdown? What breakdown? Roman subjecting himself to riotous self harm at the end of episode nine was completely ignored. One minute he’s getting trampled in New York, the next minute he’s all bandaged up at mommy’s house in the Caribbean. WTF? I can’t think of a better example to prove my point that the show just had no interest in evolving its characters. When they had a chance to do something incredible with Roman they chose to spend the finale making him, once again, Kednall’s bitch. Weak.

Shiv and Roman just…gave up? Aside from the hilarious Jeremy Strong impressions, the scene between Shiv and Roman on the beach was empty and stupid. After four years they all of a sudden decide to just give up? Nothing in the jokes about killing him led to their decision to let him take over. It felt like the writers threw a bunch of nonsense lines into the script because they needed a beat before Shiv and Rome swam out to Kendall on the dock.

Shiv’s unexplained change of mind. I’ve seen people say that actually seeing Kendall in the big chair made her do it. Or that it was because she thought back to what he did on election night and chose saving the country over anointing the person who titled the election for Menckin. Or that she was testing Kendall to decide based on how she saw him react to the threat of losing his life’s dream. Or that she realized he would just be Logan Roy 2.0. Or that she wanted her child to one day succeed Tom (a stupid theory when you think about Shiv willingly condemning her unborn child to the very life she led). Any or all of those could be why she did it. We’ll never know. All the show gave us was that she didn’t think he would be good at the job. I’m sorry? We watched this show for four seasons only to have the decisive moment of the series come down to Shiv’s vague assessment of her brother’s ability to be a CEO? That’s insulting. 

Looking back, what I’ll remember about Succession is the yawning gap between its superior acting and empty storytelling. I wish we could go back in time to the end of season two and see what would happen to the show if it were in the hands of someone capable of having more than one idea. 

A picture of God

Deus ex machina.

God from the machine.

I avoid predicting television shows because viewers rarely have enough information to make good ones. I tried earlier this season with Person of Interest and it blew up in my face, so I’m loathe to do it again. But I will.

My prediction for the Person of Interest season finale is that Harold has to choose between The Machine and Samaritan.

I am pushed to the point of prediction by the dialogue surrounding Harold in the past two episodes. Look at some of these lines:

“I can’t help you make a picture of God.” – Grace said to Greer as he seeks information about Harold.

“Perhaps you can.”

This conversation between Greer and Finch was amazing.

“I want to talk about the future. And who more qualified for that conversation than the father of artificial intelligence?” – Greer to Finch while Greer has him captive.

“I’d always imagined it was about the power of creation.” – Greer

“Now your God has disappeared, operating on its own accord. Children can be so disappointing.” – Greer

“I’d be aware of false idols, Mr. Greer.”

“As the father of AI you’re the only one in the world that can destroy it.” – Greer. Noah? The flood? Anyone?

“Having built something significantly smarter than myself how could I possibly anticipate its evolution?” – Finch

“You’re a destroyer, not a creator,” – Harold. OH MY GOD.

“The father became fearful of his son.” – Greer

“I built the machine to save lives. But how could I be certain that it wouldn’t one day determine that all of humanity was irrelevant?” Finch, to Greer.

“It’s pure hubris to think that you could control something so powerful.” Finch, to Greer.

“That is the most important man in the world. The father of a new age.” – Greer about Finch.

Father, creator, evolution. Shows don’t run up to their season finale with dialogue like that by accident. Greer’s search for Harold has now spanned two seasons and it will come to a head in a season finale entitled Deus ex Machina. Making Harold the subject of all this talk – the one who created this intelligence and imparted into it his humanity – leads me to believe he is approaching his moment of truth.

Covering my bases:

In the midst of a double-bogey this morning I was thinking back to the end of last season. The Machine went into “God Mode” and spoke directly to Root and Reese after shutting itself down due to a virus unleashed by Decima. Everyone converged on what they thought was The Machine, only to find out it had dissembled itself and shipped its components off to parts unknown. We still don’t know where it went, and it hasn’t been very much of a subject this season. I doubt that facet of the story will be brought up in this season’s finale, too.

But it got me thinking. God from the machine. The Machine evolved from what Harold first created. It knew enough to hide from Root, then it initiated an “analog interface” to use Root to prepare for what she (The Machine she, not Root she) saw coming, which we now have to believe is Samaritan.

There’s a literary meaning to deus ex machina that symbolizes when a story suddenly comes together in such a preposterous way that it is almost comedic. Writers try to avoid it for that reason, but it doesn’t have to be that literal for the season finale. It can mean The Machine does something no one – Harold, Greer, Collier – expects. Something like take herself apart and ship herself somewhere else.

One last thing bugs me from the most recent episode: Who sent Collier that text? He just found out his brother committed suicide for wrongly being accused of a crime by The Machine and – bam – he gets this text from someone who claims to be able to tell him what happened. My crackpot theory: The Machine sent it to start the process that will end in the season finale. My even more crackpot theory: Samaritan did it.

We’ll find out Tuesday.

Thoughts on True Detective

The season finale of HBO’s True Detective is in less than an hour, and I thought I would share my thoughts.

I heard the show get rave reviews but didn’t know until Friday night that I have a three-month HBO preview so I caught up with its seven episodes in short order. Its first three episodes put me to sleep more than once, but in the show’s defense I was also very tired. It picked up in episodes four and five then finally kicked it in gear for six and seven.

Really, the show hasn’t done very much for me. I like the Rusty Cohle character a lot and enjoy his odd interpretation of human existence. But I’m not buying that he’s some sort of savant detective. I’m not buying that Marty Hart is much of a detective either, especially not if it proves out that his daughter was victimized by The Yellow King and he had no idea. Arranging five male dolls around a naked female doll, drawing lewd cartoons in her notebook with flying things and a giant wearing a mask yeah that didn’t spark a thought in his mind.

Maybe I missed out not having to wait a week between each episode reading all the theories on who or what The Yellow King is. Frankly, if I didn’t know it was a big deal I might not have caught onto it until they were sitting in Rusty’s storage shed.

And a note on theories. I spent six years studying freeze frames from Lost like many others did and in the end had nothing to show for it. True Detective is much tighter than Lost on account of about 116 fewer episodes but the larger lesson is this: Forget about them once the finale begins.

Chances are the first seven episodes didn’t give you enough information to make the right guess. Sure, it could be the lawnmower man who was mowing in spirals at the end of episode seven and it could be Marty’s father-in-law (which would probably grind my gears) but really we don’t know. I spent so much time of The End waiting for the answer to unfold for some big theory that by the time it was over and no answer came I missed out on what the show really wanted me to experience.

So when the finale starts in about 20 minutes, forget about screen caps and what letter was obscured behind Marty’s head in episode seven and all of that. Just enjoy it whatever it turns out to be.

UPDATE

I’m going to talk about the finale. But first I’m going to issue a SPOILER ALERT because HBO had major problems with its streaming service and many viewers weren’t able to watch it live. Do not consider this precedent.

Click away now.

Really lackluster finale, I thought. I like to view them through this frame: What the finale showed matters and what it didn’t show doesn’t matter. So what did it show?

That the yellow king was the lawnmower guy. Okay. Why was he a serial killer? Well we don’t really get that. Because he was messed up, I guess is what we’re to go with. It’s hard to explain a character when he’s not introduced until the last episode. I can’t explain why what they did choose to show us was him with a bunch of different accents. The yellow king was basically the bad guy who was there because there had to be a bad guy. Shallow character building, in my opinion.

I always believe that any shows final scene represents the most important story the writer(s) want to tell. In True Detective that scene belong to Rusty.

It showed Rusty having a brush with death and a brief emotional breakdown for the love he felt toward his daughter. It changed him as evidenced by what he said to Marty as they walked away from the hospital. If you want to reflect on what True Detective was ultimately about, look no further.

Forget what wasn’t shown. Marty’s daughter and what drove her to draw those disturbing pictures didn’t matter and wasn’t addressed at all in the finale. Black stars and “kin” and all that wasn’t either. The yellow king was but that’s because it had to be; it was done with 20 minutes left.

True Detective was about Rusty Cohle’s journey from pessimism to optimism. I just don’t think it was told very well.

Cliffhangers, cult followers and Stan’s Soviet mole

I’m a lot better at season finale cliffhangers than I used to be. I’ll credit Lost for that. After all of those agonizing waits between seasons I learned to let a show recede from my memory. Besides, how could any show ever leave us hanging as hard as Lost did every May? Cliffhangers now are a cakewalk in comparison!

I also stopped watching previews for future episodes of the shows I watch. Those are done by marketing departments, not story writers, and are designed to leave you feeling anticipation for the next episode. If the show is good, you’ll want to watch the next episode. If not, you won’t. Ain’t nobody got time for marketing departments.

Here are some quick thoughts on a few shows I watched that ended with life-and-death cliffhangers. On The Americans we know that the Keri Russell character is not going to die. The Following gave us three life-and-deathers: Joe Carroll, Ryan Hardy and Claire Matthews. Carroll might actually be dead, but we can be pretty sure Hardy and Matthews are not. Is the point of a cliffhanger then to really leave us wondering if a character will survive? Most of the times not. Instead it usually leaves us wondering, “How will they get out of this one?”

The Following

I liked The Following from its beginning but was apprehensive about what would happen when the shock value from its brutal violence wore off. If you remember the first season of American Horror Story, The Following was similarly messed up in psychology but with a startling level of violence. The disturbing apex of that quality featured escaped serial killer Joe Carroll honor killing one of his cult members, followed by Carroll – covered in blood – having sex with a follower as two other followers achieved the mood by choking each other.

The show did lag in parts of its 13-episode first season, but overall The Following remained very strong. It has a similar feel to the early episodes of Revenge, a story fitting together so perfectly that it almost has to be being told in review. Former college professor, failed author and Edgar Allan Poe worshiper Joe Carroll is writing a new story  about the FBI agent who put him in prison and stole his wife.

The continuing revelations of more followers is something I will grant, for now. If they show up too conveniently too often they will cross the line from being part of the story to being a “hand of God” to bail it out. It got dangerously close to that point when people kept appearing out of the woods to help break out of the farmhouse.

How will the story change? Joe is dead, I will buy that for now yet not be surprised if he isn’t. He’s too good to remove from the show entirely, so some flashbacks wouldn’t be out of the ream of possibility. The scene of the girl in the restaurant reacting to news of his death might indicate some sleeper cells.

The Americans

I wasn’t wild about the pilot. I can’t quite put my finger on the uneasy feeling it left me with, maybe I thought it was a little forced. Having Stan suspect his neighbors of being spies to the point that he would break into their garage seemed too convenient to me. We can’t expect television to always portray realistic situations, but that felt like it went too far. In any case I wasn’t sure I would stick with the show and put it on the DVR level. An article detailing how the series creator had a background in intelligence convinced me to give it a chance. After a couple episodes I was not just enjoying the show, I was loving the drama. Most times a show generates its drama with action, but not The Americans. It carried drama throughout its episodes by placing the characters’ dialogue gently on top of its already tense Cold War setting. Very nicely done.

I didn’t like the choice of making Stan’s Soviet mole as someone so obviously sexy, I felt it undercut Stan’s reason for falling for her in the first place. He didn’t carry on an affair with her because she is gorgeous and he is horny. He couldn’t stop himself because spending years under deep cover with a white supremacist group cleaved his marriage. His wife hoped his new assignment in Washington would give her back the Stan Beeman she fell in love with. It hasn’t. Stan is as preoccupied with his work as ever, barely knows his teenage son and his wife dangerously close to leaving him.

He sees Nina as someone vulnerable who understands what it is like to live a lie, something his wife just cannot do for him. Had they cast someone less drool-inducingly sexy I think that would have played better.

(Stan’s wife is played by the perfectly beautiful Susan Misner, leading me to quip, “Yeah, I’d cheat on my wife Susan Misner. Sure I would, right after I spy for the Soviets.” Meaning of course that I would never.)

Otherwise I thought the show was pretty well done.

Daytime stories + primetime setting = Bad

At the end of Nashville’s season finale, Juliette Barnes sat on a chair in The Bluebird Cafe and sang her lungs out in promising us that nothing in this world will ever break her heart again. It was a dazzling vocal display by Hayden Panettiere to cap off the show’s inaugural season that featured better singing talent than I expected it would, Connie Britton notwithstanding.

Unfortunately there’s more to the show than their music.

While Juliette was belting her little country heart out the writers were dolling out one television cliche after another. They put two characters in a car wreck. They made for the country cowboy star who is hiding his sexuality to get spotted with a girl by his boyfriend. They made a boyfriend pop the question way sooner than we all know he should. This lazy, ham-fisted storytelling came after they predictably threw Deacon off the wagon and conveniently gave Maddie a bout of teenage curiosity that led to her discovering Deacon, not Teddy, is her biological father.

All of this confirms something about Nashville that I spent the first season trying to prove to myself wasn’t true: It might just be a show designed to sell music. I clung to every perceived kernel of character development and storytelling to find anything that might convince me otherwise, all to no avail. We will get no creativity here.

A creative show wouldn’t send Deacon on an immediate bender culminated by his drunken attack on Teddy outside city hall. Teddy repaying Rayna’s commitment that he would not loose his daughter was the only moment in this whole storyline that felt like a decision genuinely made by a character instead of forced by a writer. Maddie’s spontaneous curiosity that sent her digging in her mom’s closet and running to tell Deacon felt driven more by having to get it done in two episodes than by what her character would actually do.

This kind of storytelling is acceptable in the five-day-a-week format of a daytime soap opera. It is offensive in a broadcast network’s Wednesday night lineup. Viewers deserve so much better.

It was obvious from episode one that Gunnar had feelings for Scarlette and that she would eventually leave Avery for him. Unlike Teddy, Deacon and Rayna, whose storyline was entirely predictable and therefore boring, this love triangle could work because these are three characters who usually stay true to themselves. When they make bad decisions the writers let them realize it and deserve credit for doing so. I would be perfectly fine watching the three of them explore their feelings over the course of season two. Instead the writers made Gunnar propose. Forcing them to act on their feelings this fast ruins everything and robs us of a story that could have been very enjoyable.

Want more? There’s more. Instead of letting the Peggy Kenter character fade away, Nashville doubled down and did what any immature show would do: It made her pregnant. Really? I mean, really? This character’s only purpose was to expedite the demise of Teddy and Rayna’s marriage. Why is a baby necessary here? Rayna finally succumbing to her feelings for Deacon is enough to permanently break her relationship with Teddy. The only reason to make Peggy pregnant is to complicate Teddy and Rayna getting back together, which has no business happening. If not for every show in history having already gone there it would be intriguing. Again, okay for daytime, unqualified for primetime.

The only enjoyable moments from the finale came from Juliette Barnes. Her character has been enjoyable to watch all season for the way she always comes to the right decision, however begrudgingly she might get there. At least the show lets one character have a brain. I might honestly be more interested in this show if Rayna dies in the crash and Juliette becomes the leading female character.

My theme in watching season finales this year has been trying to discern where shows might be going in their next season. With Nashville I’m afraid what it previewed during Juliette’s Bluebird performance is going to be the start of year two. Even worse, the show’s writers could actually think they’re doing a good job and keep doing exactly what they’re doing.

That leads me into thinking about whether or not I’ll tune in next fall. With all its stars coming back for season two there is plenty of reason to tune in for more Avery Barkley, Scarlett O’Connor and Gunnar Scott. I suppose you also have to stick around to see what happened in the crash, but has Nashville given us anything that would make us believe anything interesting will come of it?