TV Finales

Note: my cable has been out all week. So the only finales I have actually seen have been the ABC ones that have thankfully been available online after the finale airs everywhere.

Second Note: Contains spoilers

Finales are hard. There is so much to do, such limited time to do it in, and there is a delicate balance that recent shows seem to completely misunderstand.

Season finales seem to suffer from the inevitable, we want to wrap some things up, but we also need to tease you over the summer phenomenon. Season 1 of Lost really seemed to struggle with this the most, as they focused more on the teaser and less on the wrap-up and thereby incurred the wrath of many fans.

Season two of Lost ended with an overcorrection – too much wrap-up and not enough teaser. The ending of season two reunited Michael and Walt, left Jack, Kate, and Sawyer hostage, and left Sayid, Jin and Sun out on a boat (don’t even ask), the button unpushed, chaos, and Locke and Eko possibly dead inside the hatch.

The rest of these lost-a-ways were having a bonfire.

So, the season ends with the constant that when people are missing, other people either do not notice, or do not have the impetus to do anything about it. All the people who would notice and care are either hostage, on a boat, or trapped in the hatch.

The one thing you can say about Lost… no one knows what anyone else is doing… so the season finale is just like the rest of the season. That is my ringing endorsement.

I missed the season finale of House, but based on the TWOP recaplet and the boards, it sounds like an episode that would have annoyed me as a season ender. This, if you ask anyone who knows my TV habits, is shocking, as Hugh Laurie is the only man I would ditch my husband for. (Okay, not really, but… he is lovely.)

The dream/hallucination storyline is sucky. In a regular episode it totally sucks. As a finale? Screw you. That is totally wrong.

Moving on.

The Series Finale.

The Series Finale suffers a worse fate – to wrap up an entire series in a satisfying way. No cliffhangers, no teasers. Closure. Happy endings. Believable happy endings.

So you know where this is going: Alias.

Alias is a show I was hooked on from the moment I saw Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) in that pink wig strutting into CIA HQ and telling the desk matron that Director Devlin had a walk-in.

Who is this crazy brash broad?

I missed the first half of that episode. The promos made me think it would be a poor man’s La Femme Nikita (and I mean the movie, NOT the TV show, and NOT the horrible Bridget Fonda “homage” to La Femme Nikita, which, please, someone deserves extreme dental work for that entire film).

I was so wrong.

I loved her. She was smart, funny, and insanely athletic. And? She was strangely naïve, trusting, and vulnerable.

She did it all – super spy, super student, super girl-friend, super friend. We saw the struggle to do it all – the other characters saw her doing things “effortlessly”. We knew the struggle – with her dad, her boss, her job, her compartmentalizing her entire life, keeping her friends in the dark to keep them safe, juggling the craziness of her life.

Season two brought Sydney a new challenge: her mother. Magnificent Lena Olin – as Irina Derevko - simultaneously pulled at our heart strings because we wanted her to develop a relationship with Sydney, and scared the ever-living-crap out of us, because we knew she was smarter than us, more devious, not to be trusted, up to something, totally scheming, and yet…? She was totally cool and Syd’s mom – and just like the rest of us, Syd wanted her mother’s love and approval.

They had a stunning dynamic on screen. The relationship was written perfectly – acted perfectly – and then you throw in Victor Garber as Jack Bristow, and you have the most amazing Spy Family. Spy Mommy, Spy Daddy, Spy Baby, and they bicker like a real family and then they go thwart evil, bicker more, shoot baddies, bicker, and have real moments.

Season two was a masterpiece. I dare anyone to prove otherwise.

Seasons three, four, and five were hard. We wanted Lena back. We wanted Lauren to go away. We wanted Rachel and Tom to go away. We wanted Dixon to lose the dreads. Please man, those were so bad.

Syd got pregnant (Okay, Jennifer got pregnant and somehow they decided it was a good plotline). We wanted Syd to sit down and not do roundhouse kicks while she was pregnant with a big baby belly. It was disturbing to watch that. The best scenes with her preggers were in mentoring Rachel. And not because of Rachel. Because we saw that Syd was no longer that girl who was tricked into being a spy for the bad guys, she was now knowledgeable and able to mentor without coming across as a know-it-all. It was a good fit.

Rubbing her belly and cooing over a craps table? Really kind of icky.

All of this preamble is leading somewhere – trust me.

So now we’ve had this uneven 4+ years – the first two knocked your socks off, the latter years still hold you in case Lena shows back up, or even just to see Syd and Jack interact – because the dynamic and chemistry between them was completely undeniable. They were always completely believable as family – and even when the missions were crap, or Rachel or Tom spoke, or Dixon did something weird with his hair (did he not get to play dress-up enough?) we could always rely on Jack and Syd – father and daughter, working together in a world full of total distrust, arguing about who to trust, with what, when, etc. How many of us have ever thought, Wow, I’d really like to work for my dad in a role where I will have to stand up to him on a daily basis? Um. That would be none of us. And if Jack Bristow was your dad? He is so good at killing people. His skill is a crime in and of itself. This is not an easy man to defy.

Okay, so how do you wrap it up?

We’ve got this whole Rambaldi storyline that started in season one – we’ve gotta wrap that up. We know Spy Mommy has always had an agenda – we’ve gotta wrap that up. Sloane has spent too much time going from bad to “good” to bad again – we’ve gotta pick a position (evil, duh) and then make him unforgivable. And then? He killed Syd’s fiancé in season 1. She’s spent the last 5 years wanting to kill him. Are we going to do something about that?

And now we have these extra characters – Rachel, Tom, Peyton (played by Amy Acker – and can I say how much fun she is to watch? First Fred, then Ilyria, now Peyton – she’s a hoot). And, a new group of baddies – Prophet 5. What are we going to do with them? And then we’ve got the whole, Syd was kidnapped and tortured by her mom, while pregnant, and there’s this creepy nursery set up for when the baby is born. What does Spy Mommy want with the baby? Who is she working for?

And even better? We spent the first half of season 5 introducing Rachel, Tom, and Peyton to set up a spin-off… and that’s not going to happen. Great. And, we find out mid-set-up that Alias is officially going off the air. Great. And then? Then we find out that they aren’t getting the full run of episodes.

5 years of storylines. Rambaldi has to be wrapped up. Syd is supposed to bring about the end of the world. The prophecy says so.

So that’s another problem. You can’t end a series with the apocalypse. I know that this is fiction and all, but there’s that whole, “then how are we here to know the story” thing that your audience can’t get over. This takes place on earth, with people and everything, so there is some realism that is required.

So now we need an out – fulfill the prophecy, but basically everyone misunderstood it. Check.

Let Syd finally kill Sloane. Yay! Whoo hoo! About f'ing time! Check.

Make Syd have a battle with her mother. Force Irina into a stance as a baddie. She picks being bad over her daughter. Syd kills Spy Mommy. Bummer. But mom - don't you love us? We love you. Sigh. Check.

Spy Daddy. Spy Daddy and Sloane were peers from the beginning. Friends at some points. What does Spy Daddy do now that Sloane is dead? Well, we bring Sloane back from the dead. Rambaldi’s secret was immortality (only he didn’t live to use it??). So now Sloane’s back. Crap. Ah, Spy Daddy comes to kill Sloane… but Sloane. Is. Immortal. Um?

Well, the good (?) news is that Spy Daddy is dying from multiple gun shot wounds. So Spy Daddy traps Sloane for all of eternity with a big blast. Spy Daddy dies (no fair!) and Sloane is trapped alone for all of eternity. Um, okay.

Prophecy – check
Killing parents to force protagonist to be the adult – check
Killing bad boss – check
Good guys win – check
Bad guys lose – check

It’s an easy formula – and yet, if you ask anyone, the episode was supremely disappointing.

Was it because it was a bittersweet ending? Not really. I mean, we all hated to see Jack die. We all hated that Spy Mommy didn’t choose to love Syd above all else. But that isn’t it (Although, seriously, that was painful. Where’s opium-smoking Freud when you need him?).

It was too rushed. It was too neat. It was too sterile. It was too much of a foregone conclusion.

My expectations were incredibly low. I was unspoiled, but knew there was too much to do and that it wouldn’t feel satisfactory. If it were a stand-alone episode it would be one I wouldn’t have any interest in watching again.

The acting was superb. There was just too much for the writers to do, so it turned into tons of action and tiny bits of exposition to try to sum up 5 years. You can’t do it well. You shouldn’t do it at all.

I blame the networks for this crap. When a series is cut short prematurely the story suffers, and that makes the viewers suffer.

For some reason finales are hyped for weeks, and whether it’s the hype, or the things that finales must overcome, they are always disappointing. The good ones make you agonize for the first month about having to wait for another 3 months. The bad ones make you roll your eyes and say, Well, that’s an hour I am never getting back.

I mean, seriously, if the guy invented immortality, why is he dead?