No_Thing on our Discord server

What do I know about this series going into it?

Never heard of it. It seems to be a British historical drama, and I think I glimpsed the fact that it’s based on a book series.

Previously On

Uhtred son of Uhtred narrates. King Edward wants to fulfill his father’s ambition to create the kingdom of England; he was told by Aelswith that this destiny.

Uhtred is the ruler of Northumbria.

Somebody will set fire to a church if Constantin’s army appears.

Uhtred and his men climb up a cliff face to rescue somebody.

Edward was impatient and decided to attack the fortress early. “Give us Lord Aethelsomething and Lady Aethsomething or we will attack!” they announce.

Recap

The opening credits show fire spreading across the face of Britain, starting in the southeast and moving north and westward.

We open with the man who delivered the ultimatum to the fortress. As he waits for a response, an arrow is fired at his feet. He returns to King Edward and reports this as a negative response.

“Did you see my father?” somebody asks. The issuer doesn’t respond, which means no.

Meanwhile, inside the fortress, somebody issues an order to another: “Get the girl and parade her from the ramparts”. The issuer is aware that Constantin1 won’t approve of this action, but doesn’t care. They are watched by someone with a helmet, who gives the camera a look; I assume he is loyal to Constantin.

Elsewhere in the fortress, two prisoners suddenly pull out a hidden knife and break free. One is named “Finan” in the captions.

I can already tell that I will have a lot of trouble telling these characters apart. They are all young-ish Nordic-ish men of reasonably the same height and build; they are all wearing generic post-Dark-Ages garb, and there’s only one way I can tell which is King Edward.

In the main hall of the fortress, an advisor is telling the king to “wait for the armies” - I assume reinforcements on the way to save him from King Edward - but the King is having trouble with it. As a matter of honor, he doesn’t want to ignore King Edward’s challenge, one king to another. “I could just hand you over,” the king (I assume Constantine) says.

One of the men from earlier, identified as Lord Whitgar, enters. He asks permission to take Lady Aelfwyn to a more secure, higher area. Constantin agrees - but Whitgar instead takes her out onto the ramparts, to demonstrate to Edward that she is still alive. His henchman even puts a knife to Aelfwyn’s throat.

One of King Edward’s men starts forward, to negotiate for Aelfwyn’s life, but Edward holds him off.

Whitgar, seeing that Edward has refused to take the bait, now goes a step further: “Throw her over, show them we are ruthless.”

That’s when Helmeted Man from earlier grabs Whitgar from behind and puts a knife to his throat. A standoff ensues, but Whitgar waves his henchman down and he releases Aelfwyn. Helmeted Man tells her to run.

It turns out Helmeted Man works for Uhtred, who (as we saw in the Previously) has infiltrated the fortress. Whitgar has guessed this - perhaps he recognizes Helmeted Man - and has started running around the fortress shouting “Uhtred! Uhtred!”

Outside, an intial force from Edward’s army has launched its attack, taking a battering ram to the doors of the fortress. Arrows are fired at them from above. Inside, they prepare and pour boiling tar down upon the ramming team. Whitgar’s subordinate grins wildly and sadistically at their cries of pain, then glimpses the church burning in the distance. “We’re saved!” he cries out.

Through the following conversation, I finally get some context for all of this. Constantin’s advisor is actually Edward’s father, Aethelheim. He is conspiring with Edward to make his grandson Aelfweard - Edward’s son - king in Edward’s place.

Aelfweard, in his naivete, wants to go out and talk to his father, but the others point out that Edward will never trust him again.

Meanwhile, Uhtred sends the only woman on his infiltration team to find Aelfwyn and help her escape.

Yahya, Constantin’s subordinate, comes with news: The reinforcement army has arrived, the burning church having been the signal of their arrival (as I briefly glimpsed but did not comprehend from the Previously). Aethelheim takes this as proof he was always right. He knows Edward well; he is impulsive. As long as they stick to the plan and stay strong, wait for the reinforcements, they cannot lose.

But Constantin decides to get creative. Let’s make Edward even more impulsive: we’ll pretend that we have given up and are abandoning the fortress. Withdraw people from the ramparts and let anybody who wants to leave flee via the sea gate. He’ll launch an attack2 and we can surround him.

Uhtred overhears this and tells his men they need to get to the ramparts, to warn Edward.

Uhtred’s friend, Hild, has found Aelfwyn. They try to make their escape, but run into one of Whitgar’s soldiers. Hild - who had previously spoken that she had sworn never to pick up a weapon again - is forced to kill him against her will.

Back in the throne room, Aethelheim tries to dissuade Constantin from his plan. Just stick to the current plan and we can’t lose! Whitgar enters, and he too is against the idea. Almost in tears, he begs, “Why have you opened the sea gate? My men are fleeing!” Constantin laughs at him.

Uhtred, on the ramparts, can see Constantin’s reinforcements approaching. Scots! If Edward is indeed tempted to attack the fortress, he’ll find himself surrounded: far more men inside than he expects to find, and the Scots launching a simultaneous attack from behind.

I finally learn the name of the fortress: Bebbanburg. I am not going to be able to remember that.

Out in the field, Edward gets the report: the sea gate has been opened, and the men are fleeing. His assistant begs him not to be tempted: “What if the Scots are closer than we think?” But Edward drives him away. “I need soldiers who are with me,” says the arrogant fool who apparently hasn’t posted any scouts watching out for advances from directions other than the fortress.

Uhtred tries to shout from the ramparts: “Do not come forward! Do not shoot!” But Edward’s men don’t recognize him and fire at him, forcing him to take cover.

Edward gives his rallying cry: “Men of Wessex! Men of Mercia! We take Northumbria for England! Advance!” They charge at the fortress.

In the rear camp, however, the Scots have arrived. They take the camp followers by surprise and slaughter Edward’s advisor and everyone else. Nobody even manages to ride a horse off to warn Edward. The Scots then charge at Edward’s army and begin slaughtering the rear ranks too. It takes Edward a ridiculous amount of time to notice that his men are screaming and dying maybe ten yards behind him.

In the courtyard, Constantine offers up a quick prayer, then charges out the front gate in person, leading all of his men. The two armies quickly surround Edward’s army, but rather than surrounding it from both sides, they do a sort of semicircle around it and drive them backwards, towards the enormous seaside cliff.

Uhtred watches from the ramparts, helpless to stop it. But he spots some people in the forest. Who are they? “More Scots?” asks his friend. They decide to head out and investigate.

The rearmost men in Edward’s army begin to fall over the cliff, as the combined Scot and Northumbrian army push on them more and more. A closeup on Edward’s face: he knows he’s going to die. There is a cry of despair as Aldhelm is trampled to death; I don’t know who Aldhelm is.

Uhtred and his men ride horses into the forest and encounter “Stiorra”. The men with her are those she gathered to help Edward, but they arrived too late, which is why they didn’t join the battle. Uhtred begs her to change her mind, name-checking Aethelstan and Sigryggir and other people of significance that I don’t recognize.

“Danes should not die for Saxons,” Stiorra maintains3. Another woman promises to reward Stiorra if she joins the battle. “You can’t promise me anything,” says Stiorra.

“But I can,” says Uhtred. “I was raised a Dane. Folow me and all Danes will live in peace here! Do it not for Saxons, but for your own forebears who came here to make a homeland!” The music swells dramatically to support him.

Thanks to the music, Stiorra has been convinced, and the Scots and Northumbrians are surprised when the Danes show up and attack them from behind. In turning to face the Danes and defend themselves, they have to let up on their assault on Edward; it is now they who are surrounded.

Edward is saved. One of the Scots orders his men to torch the fortress4, but Wihtgar (this is, I think the real spelling; I’ve been spelling it wrong all along) and his men are on the ramparts5 and shoot anyone who tries to approach with that in mind.

Uhtred spots Wihtgar and returns to the fortress6 to challenge him one on one. Wihtgar comes out to face him, but states that he knows he is not Uhtred’s equal at swordsmanship. So he has other men attack Uhtred in his stead while he makes his escape. He is without honor!

Meanwhile, though, the fortress is set on fire.

Another man, who I’ve seen often but whose name I haven’t learned, has cornered Aethelheim in the bowels of the fortress. Aelfweard arrives to save his grandfather, but the attacker insists that Aelfweard would not be defending Aethelheim if he knew what Aethelheim really did.

“What does Aethelstan speak of?” asks Aelfweard, giving me the attacker’s name.

Aethelheim starts to blather, so Aethelstan just comes out with it: He had Aelfweard’s mother killed to start a war with the Danes.

“It’s not true!” Aethelheim insists.

“It’s not?” asks Aelfweard.

“There is a reason,” says Aethelheim. “She was not the target. It was a tragedy.”

“She was killed by men you sent?”

It seems Aethleheim sent men to slaughter some “pilgrims”, not knowing his daughter-in-law was among them. Aelfweard, despondent, drops his sword and walks away, letting Aethelstan do what he likes. But Aethelstan keeps his promise: I said I’d let you live if you told the truth.

Aethelheim, however, immediately kills himself before Aethelstan can stop him.

I know these names are historically accurate but it’s very confusing when everybody’s name starts with Aethel.

Uhtgar corners Wihtgar above the great hall. Wihtgar is accepting of his fate: “Kill me,” he says. “Just as I killed my father, and your son will kill you. That is our bloodline’s destiny.”

Wait, what? Wihtgar is Uhtgar’s father?

Uhtgar agrees and tosses him over the railing and onto a convenient skewer that has been left standing in the middle of a dinner table. He then makes his way into the courtyard and watches as the fortress has begun to burn down. Aethelstan arrives tries to persuade Uhtgar to leave, but he refuses.

“It is my destiny to die in Bebbanburg!” Uhtred exclaims. But God has other ideas, as thunderclouds arrive and a downpour begins, putting out the flames. Uhtgar drops to his knees and sobs; I’m not sure why.

Some time later, Uhtred welcomes Constantin, now his prisoner, to the fortress, where the celebration is under way. He introduces himself as the lord and heir of the lands around Bebbanburg, which Constantin acknowledges. They offer a prisoner exchange: Uhtred has Constanin’s nephew, while Constantin has six of Uhtred’s men. But Constantin issues some veiled threats: These lands are disputed and I could bring more men…

I’m surprised Uhtred doesn’t just retort, “…and I could kill you where you stand”.

Eventually they agree to a longer peace of some kind. Edward, outside the fortress, watches Constantin ride off, who looks at Edward with contempt as he passes.

King Edward enters the fortress, and his mother (the woman who Stiorra refused to believe) announces him. “My son, who has led us to such victory!” He approaches Uhtred and acknowledges his help for the victory, and agrees with Uhtred’s decision that the Danes may live in these lands in peace. He tells Uhtred the lands of Northumbria will be his for generations.

Meanwhile, outside Hild and someone named Osbert are headed to the fortress on foot. She hints that Uhtred is his father.

Back inside, Edward embraces Uhtred and says he will accept his oath later before all, and they will work together to make England whole and keep the Scots out.

But Uhtred has other ideas. In fact, the Scots aren’t interested in these lands anymore, because Constantin has renounced his claim - in return for Uhtred’s pledge not to join Edward’s kingdom. He’ll still pay tribute to Edward, but Northumbria will stand on its own as a buffer between England and Scotland.

Edward feels massively betrayed. What about my plan to unite all of England?

Uhtred explains that Edward has proven, due to his treatment of the Danes, that he can’t be the uniter that he wants to be. One day England will be united, he acknowledges. Just not under Edward.

In a closing voiceover, Uhtred acknowledges that he is a thorn in the side of Wessex and asks some nonsensical questions. “Will blood prevail, or will king slay king once again on the battlefield?”

I am Uhtred son of Uhtred, he says. But hang on, didn’t I discover earlier that his father was Wihtgar?

The episode closes with Uhtred staring out over Babbenburg’s ramparts, crying, under a montage of clips from previous episodes that mostly involved people’s deaths.

Lingering questions

• Will Uhtred’s son kill him?

• Will Uhtred keep his promise to Constantin?

• Will England ever be united?

Ratings

I evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.

The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; a low rating may reflect low quality, but it may also reflect a deliberate choice. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.

Story: 6/10. I loved the sheer number of moving parts in this story, and the storyline avoided many of my expected obvious developments. Uhtred was completely unable, despite his best efforts, to get Edward’s attention and keep him out of the trap. Aethelheim really was right all along and his plan would have worked had Constantin not overplayed his hand. Things like that.

It wasn’t without flaws, though. There was too much reliance on coincidence, like Uhtred spotting Stiorra’s men in the forest. And some developments weren’t fully explained or explored. For example, we don’t see Edward’s men charge at the front gates the first time around; we get a mention from one of Uhtred’s men that “Edward has begun his attack” and cut to them already there.

Writing: 3/10. The writing was pretty awful. The rousing speeches were never very rousing, and the characters spoke to one another in cliches. It seemed to actually get worse as it progressed; the conversations at the beginning were decent, but by the time Edward and Uhtred confronted one another and Uhtred gave his closing voiceover it felt like something ChatGPT could have written in its earliest days. It was like the writers were losing effort and interest as they wrote the episode in real time.

Production: 4/10. The special effects were very good, especially for a Netflix show of its day. The effect of the men approaching and falling off the cliff was well done, as were the makeup and wound effects.

But the acting was decidedly substandard, especially from Uhtred, Edward’s mother, and Stiorra; dull deliveries made bad dialogue seem even worse. And the color grading was the dullest of dull greys and blues.

Characterization: 6/10. This is an interesting trick and it’s very rare. Usually you need either good acting or good writing, preferably both, to deliver good character; I’ve yet to see an episode accomplish it with neither. Because despite everything, I really felt like I got to know Aethelheim, Constantin, Edward, and Wihtgar; perhaps it’s no coincidence that the four did the best acting of anyone in the cast. I could happily watch a series that was centered around those four rather than Uhtred.

Accessibility: 5/10. By the end I did manage to understand almost the entirety of the plot, but God help me if I could match more than five character names to faces. Confusing as all hell and the bad color grading did not help.

Closure: 8/10. Assuming Uhtred really does keep his promise, and assuming Edward is powerless to stop him without risking him allying with the Scots against him, this is a natural end to the series. The montage at the end, badly written as it was, helped seal the deal pretty nicely. There are some loose ends but they’re fairly small.

Do I want to watch the series now?

No. I love costume dramas - I love costume dramas - especially with complex political angles. But unfortunately this one is too badly written and badly acted.

WordiGirl on Discord

What do I know about this series going into it?

I’d never heard of it before the request. It seems to be a PBS kids show about a word-themed superhero.

Every source seems to list the episodes in a different order. Wikipedia claims this is the last episode and says it’s season 8 of episode 12. Amazon puts this as the 10th episode of season 9 and lists another episode after it - but the latter has an earlier airdate, so that can’t be right. JustWatch does that thing where it lists a dozen blank episodes with no names or descriptions, just to mess with your head.

This is probably the correct finale. Probably.

Recap

According to the opening credits, Wordgirl is a superhero from the planet Lexicon, with the powers of flight and a large vocabulary. It’s not quite clear how she uses this vocabulary to defeat villains. Her pet monkey, “Huggy Face”, is also superpowered.

The narrator, Chris Parnell, sets the scene: WordGirl is at Violet’s house, and the latter has set up automated cameras in her backyard to take photographs of nature.

Meanwhile, at a bank across town, we are introduced to a pair of supervillains named Rhyme and Reason. Rhyme is the mastermind of their crime spree: they steal expensive stuff (like gold bars) and then steal something that happens to rhyme with it (like old cars). Rhyme is very much into the rhyming shtick - but Reason is not very enthused. “We never get stopped stealing the first thing!” he complains. “And then we go steal something that isn’t even valuable, just because it rhymes, and it doesn’t help that you announce what it is in advance!”

As he tries to reason (ha!) with her, he doesn’t notice, the bank teller activating the Wordgirl Signal.

WordGirl, detecting the signal with her superpowers (perhaps super-hearing?) makes her excuses to Violet and heads into the backyard - but Violet’s automated cameras capture her taking off.

WordGirl arrives at the bank and the battle begins. The villains’ tactic: Reason says something that rhymes with what he thinks Rhyme should do (like ‘breezy’), and Rhyme uses a related superpower against WordGirl (like ‘breath that is freezy’, i.e., freeze breath). WordGirl complains: You’ve got super strength and freeze breath? What does that even have to do with rhyming?

For a moment I consider that Rhyme’s true power is to develop any superpower that she can claim to have on the basis of a rhyme. But eventually Reason explains that, no, she just has a couple of superpowers, and he’s just helping her realize when to use them. He himself has no powers.

At some point Wordgirl stops fighting for a moment to explain, at length, what the word ‘harmony’ means. This had been mentioned earlier by the narrator as one of the two key vocabulary words in the episode. It doesn’t help her defeat them, though; for that she uses her super strength and speed.

When Wordgirl comes back to Violet’s house, she calls her “Bob” and then “Becky” for some reason. After that, however, she sticks with “Becky” so I will too.

“Are you keeping secrets from me?” she asks.

“Of course not,” says Becky.

“Are you sure?” she asks again.

Becky, not getting the hint, denies it again. Violet asks again: “Not even one?” and again and again and again.

Finally, Violet reveals the photographs.

Having been picked up by the police, Rhyme is still rhyming everything in the back of the police van. Reason is completely fed up: “I can’t do this anymore!” Rhyme interprets this as a prompt to break through the floor of the police van, which she does, extricating herself and her partner successfully. But Reason still walks off: “I quit.”

“But you’re my best friend!” she says sadly.

Meanwhile, back at Violet’s house, WordGirl is attempting - badly - to salvage the situation.

“I’m only going to ask you once,” says Violet. “And whatever answer you give me, I’ll believe it. Are you WordGirl?”

Becky admits it, although I would’ve given a lot to see if Violet genuinely would’ve believed another denial. The WordGirl told her to reject the evidence of her eyes and ears…

Violet cries. But now that Becky has admitted it, she says she’s not mad; they just aren’t friends anymore, if they ever were friends. “All you’ve ever done is lie to me.”

Becky leaves, sadly, and the narrator is as flustered and worried as she is. Maybe she’ll team up with Reason, who never wanted to be a criminal anyway, and have to defeat Rhyme and Violet?

Next we go to the set of a game show called “May I have a word”; I briefly think this takes place inside the WordGirl universe, but it’s actually external to the show: the characters have to define the meaning of a word based on representative clips from the show, in this case the word “wedged”.

Part two of the episode begins with the narrator exhorting Rhyme and Reason and Becky and Violet to get out of their funk and do something to continue the story, but they’re all sitting around depressed that their friendships have ended.

Later, on a playground, Becky gets up the courage to approach Violet, but an idiot gets in the way: “Help!” he shouts. “There’s a girl I don’t recognize, wrecking stuff!” Violet has to explain that he’s on a playground, not in a police station, which seems to take him by surprise.

The wrecker is of course Rhyme, who’s abandoned the idea of rhyming and just wreaking havoc, furious that Reason has left. WordGirl tries to stop her, but Rhyme is far too powerful.

So WordGirl realizes her only hope is to find Reason and hope he can talk some himself into Rhyme. But he could be anywhere in the city…

He doesn’t want to cooperate, but she arrests him for possession of stolen goods (the car) and brings him to Rhyme. He has apparently changed his mind on the way over, though, and tries to prompt Rhyme as usual: “I’d like to start up this car, and drive away really…” But she petulantly refuses to go along with it.

“I never had a problem with the rhymes,” Reason tells her. “I just hated the pointless stuff that we kept stealing, like those mules we stole after stealing jewels. We spent so much money feeding them we actually lost money over all!1”

They hug and make up, after which they resume their prompt-and-attack stratagem against WordGirl.

They even defeat the monkey, whose name it seems isn’t just Huggy Face but Captain Huggy Face.

But Violet, who was in the crowd of civilians watching the mayhem, sneaks past the police and approaches the big pit of destruction in the street, where she deliberately ends a sentence with the word “Purple”. Rhyme stops beating up on WordGirl. She’s at a loss: she can’t find a word that rhymes with it2!

As she agonizes over the lack of a rhyme, powerless to continue, WordGirl breaks free from the ice and arrests them. They continue trying to search for a rhyme from the back of the patrol car.

“Why did you come back?” WordGirl asks Violet. She isn’t sure. “Can we be friends again?”

“I have to think about it,” says Violet.

The next day, Violet approaches Becky on the playground and introduces herself as if they’d never met. “I thought it would be nice if we started over,” she explains. “Who are you?”

Becky introduces herself as Becky, and Violet’s face falls, until Becky adds, “I also sometimes fight crime as WordGirl.”

“Whaaaat?” cries out Violet. “That’s a crazy thing to tell somebody you just met!”

“Because I feel like we’re giong to be best friends,” Becky explains.

As they walk off together, a giant robot starts attacking the city. Violet nods at WordGirl and she takes off to save the day.

“Since we’re coming clean,” Violet says to Captain Huggy Face, “I always knew you were a monkey.”

What.

Before the credits, there’s is a bonus round of “May I have a word”, where a contestant wins a two-person rocket-powered trapeze. The host, Beau Handsome, is disappointed that he never gets to try out or win the cool prizes himself.

Lingering questions

• What was Violet pretending she thought Captain Huggy Face was, if not a monkey?

• How old is Becky supposed to be? From scene to scene my guess shifted repeatedly from 9 to 35 and everywhere in between.

Ratings

I evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.

The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; a low rating may reflect low quality, but it may also reflect a deliberate choice. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.

Story: 7/10. A simple story elevated by a thematically appropriate subplot and a truly original approach to a villainous pairing. No notes.

Writing: 7/10. I loved the metahumor and the winking at the audience. I loved the way WordGirl actively mocks the villains for the way they got caught, and the way Reason kept pointing at her and saying to his partner, “See? See? This is why we have to stop with the rhyming nonsense!” I laughed out loud at least five times - no small feat in a half-hour episode! Even the bank teller was hysterical.

The matching of the Rhyme-and-Reason breakup with the Becky-and-Violet one was perfectly executed. The two plots really did complement each other well.

I really wanted to give this higher, but I think the vocabulary lessons were too didactic. They felt shoehorned in, which is ironic given that they’re the whole reason for the show; technically it’s the rest of the dialogue that was shoehorned in.

Also, it felt kind of odd that it was Violet’s vocabulary that saved the day. WordGirl’s main superpower is that of a great vocabulary and it was the one thing she didn’t use!

Production: 7/10. Pretty standard (maybe even a little bit substandard) animation, but it’s more than made up for by the good comedic timing and the excellent voice acting from literally everyone involved: Rhyme, Reason, WordGirl, the bank teller. I have no idea why Violet talks like the creepy owner of the motel in front of which your car broke down during a full moon, but I’m here for it.

Characterization: 4/10. Becky’s a bit of a nonentity, but I got to know the guest characters and Violet pretty well. There are a few inconsistencies, like how Reason turns on a dime from being enthusiastic about crime to fed up with it and back, or thanks WordGirl for her help and then immediately directs Rhyme to attack her mercilessly.

Accessibility: 9/10. I’m still not clear on how WordGirl actually uses vocabulary to fight crime, because in this episode she didn’t; it was Violet who did that. But other than the brief moment when Violet called her “Bob”, I was never really lost. Was that just a random name she chose, a way to hint that she’s about to accuse Becky that she doesn’t really know her?

Closure: 7/10. The reveal of the secret identity to the best friend is not often a series finale, more often a season finale, but it’s momentous nonetheless. And I’m given to understand this is the only two-parter they ever did, so it deserves an extra point just for that.

Do I want to watch the series now?

It’s genuinely hilarious, though marred by the awkward vocabulary asides. I don’t think my kids would appreciate it, as it’s not quite their taste, but I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to them if it were.

Requested By

Hattakiri on Reddit

What do I know about this series going into it?

I’ve seen its name before while wandering around TV Tropes but don’t know anything about it. While clicking through, I glimpsed the phrases “the proper way to eat ice cream” and “the school cultural festival”.

Recap

A group of students crowds around a poster advertising what captions call the “Outou festival” but what they call the “Arts festival”. Student-with-blue-hair can’t even think about it; she’s too worried about final exams. Student-with-blonde-hair, however, has come up with an idea for what she wants to do at the talent show.

Later, a teacher tells the class that they each should prepare some sort of fortune telling routine.

Talking to one another in the back of the class, Blonde Hair announces that she wants their friend group to do a cheerleading routine at the festival. Something in her phrasing causes Black Hair to freak out: “You mean you already signed us up?!”

“The teacher said I had to have it planned out already to sign up!” Blonde Hair protests.

Red Hair, named Yutaka, puts on a brave face and agrees to participate. This is, apparently, extremely out of character for her, as she is normally shy and reserved and non-adventurous. Blonde Hair uses that as leverage against Black Hair and Pink Hair: “You see? If Yutaka is willing to do it then you two have no excuse.”

Later, at home, Pink Hair tells her sister Blue Hair about the cheerleading routine. She explains that she gets sick so often, she wanted to do something active and help out Patty (Blonde Hair) while she does so.

That’s when Patty calls up. Blue Hair, real name Konata, answers the phone, and Patty challenges her with a riddle: What ticket do I have in my hand?

She gives the answer too quickly for me to follow, but it’s not hard to get the gist: Konata will get to meet and shake the hand of some extremely famous teen idol. She can’t deny Patty’s request to join the cheerleading routine now…

The next day, on the bus to school, Konata ropes in the purple-haired twins Tsukasa and Kagami as well. They get annoyed at her for doing so: “How dare you pick up the ball and run with it without asking us!”1 Tsukasa agrees readily, but Kagami remains angry. Konata tries some emotional manipulation, pretending (badly) to sob, but Kagami recognizes it for what it is. What finally convinces her is the mention that Yukata is enthusiastic about it. “But if you don’t want to help her out, then…”

With those two now on board, Konata next persuades Glasses-and-Pink-Hair to join, though she spends much of the conversation staring at the latter’s breasts.

Which seems to be everyone, so they all approach Patty for their instructions. There’s just one problem: Patty hasn’t planned this at all. She didn’t create a routine or secure a practice location or anything. She’d just had the idea. Kagami gets furious and starts giving rapid-fire orders of what needs to be done, but Patty claims not to understand Japanese well enough to follow; it seems she is from America. “What are you talking about?” Kagami rages. “You’re totally fluent!”

Later, the group overhear a couple of boys talking with a girl about pancakes. Patty thinks Japanese culture is “interesting”. Then there’s a discussion about crossdressing waiters.

I’m completely lost.

After a commercial break, Black Hair announces that the cheerleading costumes are done! In an aside, she assures Konata that they were made by someone who “really wants to see girls wearing these things”. It seems Konata’s sexual orientation is not a secret.

That night, at dinner, some of the girls speak to their parents about what arts festivals were like when they were younger. One couple mentions that it was a special day when they could bring manga into school; another talks about a haunted house. Glasses-and-Pink-Hair asks her mother about something called “Pawlonia” (I definitely spelled that wrong), and her mother asks “Why? Would that be fun?” This causes GAPH to freak out. I feel lost again.

Later, GAPH and Konata take a train to some place that they have arranged to practice the routine - but it happens to be closed. They have nowhere to practice.

Konata shows up at school wearing a witch’s costume for the fortune telling2.

Pink Hair, named Akira, has a talk with a boy named Shiraishi, who gives her some kind of instructions that she finds irritating. They clearly have a personal history they’re trying to hide from the other characters. In this case, however, he will be emceeing the festival, and so introduces Akira’s act in the rehearsal. But then he interrupts Akira immediately and tells her to get off the stage so he can rehearse introducing the next person. She takes this personally, though I suspect he’s just an idiot who doesn’t understand that the rehearsal is meant for everyone to rehearse, not just him.

Finally, the girls get together and practice the cheerleading routine on the stage after hours. The words of the routine are… surreal.

Somehow, despite this being the only time they’ve rehearsed, they know all the word-salad lyrics and perform the dance perfectly.

As they are congratulating one another, a teacher comes in. There’s a vague air that they are doing something extremely improper by being in this room at this time, but that quickly passes.

I joke, but the teacher does refer to it as a “special treat” and they react as excited as if she is giving them alcohol.

They head into the main hall of the school, where everyone else is working on their own school festival projects. Their mood (and the background music) gets a bit melancholy. The best part of the festival, they agree, is the preparation for it. This is the last time they’ll be staying at school this late to prepare something.

The next day, they are the first to perform in the festival. As they stand on stage, waiting for the curtain to come up, they are nervous and tense. They can hear Shiraishi introducing them to the crowd - but his phone goes off in the middle, and he is mortified. They share a laugh, and this breaks the tension.

The curtain begins to open.

Closing credits.

Under the credits is live-action film of a man singing while standing on a bridge; possibly that same man walking through a forest; possibly that same man spinning around on a swivel chair in his living room; and possibly a different man singing in a desert.

What was that?

Lingering questions

• Whatever happened to the fortune telling? We saw some scenes of students preparing for it, and Konata wore a witch costume for it, but we didn’t see it actually happen.

• Who was that guy in the closing credits and what does he have to do with the rest of the series? Is he just the series writer or director or something?

• What does the episode’s title refer to?

Ratings

I evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.

The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; a low rating may reflect low quality, but it may also reflect a deliberate choice. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.

Story: 3/10. A fairly standard end-of-high-school story, but marred by the lack of subplots that went anywhere. There were, instead, subplots that were left hanging: the fortune telling that we never got to see, Konata’s desire for Glasses-and-Pink-Hair; the brief discussions with two sets of parents; whatever was going on with Patty. It helped the world feel real, but deprived the story of structure.

The best part of the storyline was the one-by-one recruitment of each member of the friend group to Patty’s half-baked idea, during which I got a good sense of each one’s personality. The rest felt like the writers had no idea what they wanted to actually do in the episode and so just wrote random scenes.

Writing: 3/10. Some good bits, particularly from Konata, but the disjointed nature of the plot made its way down to the dialogue level as well. There were many conversations that felt half-finished or were there just to fill time.

Production: 6/10. I’m not a fan of the animation style, especially the chibi asides, but it was executed pretty well for 2007. The voice actors did a very good job of channeling the characters’ personalities.

The musical routine was much better than it had any right to be, and I was mildly disappointed that I didn’t get to hear it again at the end - though of course that would have been egregious filler. In fact, the episode ended at essentially a perfect moment, with the curtain just starting to go up. (Aside from that one moment, though, I hated the editing.)

I made fun of the word-salad lyrics of the dance routine, but didn’t put that under Writing because I have a strong suspicion that there were problems with the subtitles. There was clearly some missing context or nuance in the “ma’am, we’re thirsty” scene:

Characterization: 6/10. The different characters definitely had different personalities, and the voice actors brought these to life very well. I’m not 100% certain they aren’t caricatures, but I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt and grading this above average. In a 23-minute episode it can sometimes be hard to detect the presence or absence of nuance.

Accessibility: 5/10. The dialogue was so rapid-fire that without the different hair colors I wouldn’t have had a shadow of a chance of learning who the characters were; as it is, reviewing my notes above, I seem to have invented one or two characters who didn’t exist.

The main plot was pretty easy to follow, but the side conversations were frankly bewildering, exacerbated by the speed at which subtitles appeared and vanished, and the way they sometimes left Japanese words untranslated.

Closure: 4/10. Pretty standard closure for a high school series in the main plot - in fact, the poignance was pretty well executed. But there were far too many other things that were brought up and carelessly tossed aside.

Do I want to watch the series now?

No. I’ve said previously that this genre doesn’t interest me, and this doesn’t seem to be a particularly well-written version of it.

I’m going by the requester’s recommendation: episode 24 of the “complete linear broadcasting order of 2009”.

Requested By

Hattakiri on Reddit

What do I know about this series going into it?

Quite a bit. Haruhi Suzumiya is a perfectly normal schoolgirl who has, unbeknownst to her, godlike powers. She is bored with her normal day-to-day life and forms a school club called the SOS Brigade (an acronym for something that does not in fact have the initials SOS), which is intended to locate aliens, robots, “espers”, and other supernatural phenomena. Unfortunately, her powers have rewritten reality such that aliens, robots, and “espers” actually show up to the club - all disguised as students, because they each have been sent by their parent organizations to ensure that Haruhi never finds out she has these powers. The only normal human in the club is Haruhi’s hapless friend, whose name is Kwon or Kyon or something similar, and who has been let in on the others’ secrets to help keep Haruhi in the dark1. This is made difficult by Haruhi’s powers constantly causing strange things to happen, such as time loops.

The anime was famously broadcast in multiple different orders, which led to an anonymous post on 4chan that improved the lower bound of the superpermutation question.

Recap

The start of the episode is extremely abrupt, with a narrator saying that Nagato “led us” to behind his or her apartment building, where they can find lots and lots of cats. Haruhi hopes to find a black one, but with none available settles for one in white and orange.

Apparently they’re making a film, with one character in a witch’s costume and another in a sort of pink maid-ish outfit. Haruhi, the director, instructs “Yuki” to attack “Mikuru”, but I don’t yet know which characters those two people are.

Suddenly Haruhi calls a halt: she wants the cat, as a witch’s familiar, to be able to talk. She names it Shamisen and implores it to “Say something!” The narrator, Kyon, prays that the cat doesn’t actually start talking. Thankfully it does not - but the ever-moving-forward Haruhi demands that Kyon by tomorrow train the cat to do a trick, like jump through a ring of fire. Because that’s when we’re filming the climax!

Kyon sighs miserably as Haruhi storms off. He pets the cat and asks it rhetorically what it would like to eat - and the cat responds in fluent Japanese. The other students are shocked: A talking cat! Kyon desperately tries to think of a way to explain this away - but the cat itself comes to his rescue with some expert gaslighting. “I’m not talking, I’m just making sounds that happen to sound like human words and happen to line up with what you’re saying and sound like a conversation.”

Somehow the other students buy this.

That night, Kyon meets with the other students who discuss the current predicament. “What if Haruhi decides to film, say, a meteor impact?” asks one of them. “It might actually happen!” She’s mixing fiction and reality - as they saw in how she made the cat speak - and they need to figure out a way to narrow her expectations. They need to emphasize to her that fiction is not reality.

A few interesting things here: First, the students other than Kyon all readily acknowledge that they only exist because of Haruhi, which I had thought was just a theory; second, if this is the SOS Brigade, I’m not entirely clear on why Kyon tried to explain away the cat if they’re all already aware of the supernatural. Or maybe not all of the students working on the film were in on it? Certainly the episode is a little too rapid-fire for me to keep track of who everyone is yet.

One of the other students comes up with an idea: We convince Haruhi to make a classic All Just a Dream ending. If we do that - or some similar twist, like everything weird that happened in the film was a lie or a misunderstanding - then “things will go back to normal”.

I’m not sure what things they mean. Are they talking about ending their own existences? Suicide by ontology?

On the way home, Kyon pleads with the cat not to speak, and to only answer “meow”.

The cat agrees, and when they get home his younger sister is immediately enamored with it.

The next day, as Kyon walks through the school, he notes strange behavior in the people around him: people dressed as Vikings or D&D adventurers going on quests, general madness and chaos. He thinks Haruhi’s excitement about the movie is infecting everybody else.

Mikuru, the student who was in the maid-ish outfit in the movie, takes Kyon aside and blushingly gives him a coupon to some kind of cafe the students are going to be running. But she also wants to talk to him about her theory regarding Haruhi. Unlike “Koizumi”, she doesn’t quite believe that Haruhi is God; Haruhi has the ability to change the present, but that doesn’t mean she was able to change the past. The world always had supernatural elements in it; Haruhi didn’t create them. “Nagato agrees with me,” she says (though I don’t yet know who that is). She also warns Kyon not to trust Koizumi. “I’m not good at explaining things, and Nagato is under ‘restrictions’.”

Kyon says he understands, and readily agrees that her opinion makes more sense than Koizumi’s - though I’m not fully sure that I understand it.

The student dressed as a witch takes Kyon aside and gives him her opinion: The world was always like this. Haruhi didn’t create the world, she’s just “finding it”. Mikuru Asahina, who came from the future, needs to keep Haruhi in the dark, because she needs her future to happen the way it’s supposed to.

I’m very confused here but slowly working out that the SOS Brigade includes: Koizumi (the other male student, who has esper powers); Mikuru Asahina (the one dressed as a maid, who came from the future); and Nagato (the one dressed as a witch, whom I know nothing about, but who keeps biting Asahina for some reason?).

In a voiceover, Kyon talks about how unreality is bleeding into reality more and more as the film shoot progresses. The birds they pass by in the street have been turning into extinct passenger pigeons. During filming, their fake guns have begun shooting immensely powerful water hammers, which Haruhi somehow doesn’t notice.

The next night, Koizumi tells Kyon that he thinks Haruhi is too scatterbrained: She hasn’t been including proper foreshadowing and probably doesn’t even have an ending in mind. He then goes on to babble about his secret organization of espers, mentioning things about mass murder and wars. I don’t follow any of it, and neither does Kyon. “Why are you telling me this?” he asks.

“Because it’s awesome,” Koizumi answers. Kyon isn’t thrilled with that answer.

Koizumi warns Kyon not to trust Asahina.

Kyon says he’s sick of Koizumi’s jokes, and Koizumi recovers quickly: “I’m lying, what, did you take me seriously?” It’s clear he meant it, though.

Which is very interesting. I hadn’t realized that the various supernatural characters are only allies of convenience when it comes to keeping Haruhi ignorant, and that in all other ways they are at odds with one another. all of the other characters are at odds.

As Koizumi parts, he asks Kyon to force Haruhi to give up on the movie, before they finish filming and the world descends into chaos. “I don’t understand,” muses Kyon to himself. “Why do I have to convince Haruhi that a movie is a movie and reality is reality? Surely she already knows?” But then he has an idea.

The next day, Haruhi announces that it is the last day of filming, which devastates Mikuru for some reason. At the end of the film, Koizumi’s latent superpowers activate and knock the evil witch to the far end of the universe, the end. Koizumi immediately (and rather abruptly) confirms to Kyon that the world has gone back to normal, and says that both he and his “agency” are grateful.

That afternoon, Kyon works on editing the film and realizes that it’s incoherent. He has no idea what story Haruhi was trying to tell and doesn’t have the ability to do visual effects. Haruhi berates him for being useless, and reminds him that the film festival is the next day. She orders him to stay and finish it overnight… with her. He is shocked and touched by this out-of-character display of empathy.

Unfortunately, Haruhi falls asleep almost immediately and leaves Kyon to work on it alone - and he eventually falls asleep as well. When they wake up, Haruhi checks the film and discovers it is complete, with editing and effects that Kyon hadn’t added. She pronounces it not perfect but good enough.

Kyon wonders which one of the club members finished the film while they were asleep, which I find strange. Surely Haruhi’s expectations finished the film for them? Or is that not how this works?

On the way to the film festival, he narrates that Shamisen the cat has stopped talking, and all the “strangely dressed guys” he’s been seeing have disappeared.

The film is shown, and ends with Haruhi doing a voiceover on the closing credits: “This is all fictional. None of it is real. Why do I need to tell them this, Kyon?” It seems Kyon wanted to play it safe.

Some time later, Kyon and Haruhi are seated in a cafe together. He tells her that there are aliens, time travellers, and espers in the world, and they’re closer than she realizes.

“What, you mean like Yuki, Mikuru, and Koizumi?” she asks. It’s too convenient; she doesn’t believe him. But he does try to convince her: Yuki Nagato is an alien. Mikuru Asahina is from the future, but wouldn’t tell him from what year. Koizumi is an esper.

Haruhi pretends to get excited, but of course then berates him to stop messing with her. She storms out.

Kyon laments that his life would be so much easier if she just believed him - but also that he doesn’t know what would happen to the world if she did. Which is worrying: why is he taking a chance with the world?

Lingering questions

• Is Haruhi actually God, or just extraordinarily powerful? Did she bring the other members of the SOS Brigade into existence or do they have an independent reality?

• Will Haruhi ever find out about her powers? What will happen to the world if she does?

• Why does Mikuru think Kyon shouldn’t trust Koizumi? Why does Koizumi think Kyon shouldn’t trust Mikuru?

Ratings

I evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.

The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; a low rating may reflect low quality, but it may also reflect a deliberate choice. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.

Story: 3/10. For an episode that was so rapid-fire in content, surprisingly little happened in it. There was only the one plot (trying to figure out how to finish the movie without ending the world), and that ended extremely abruptly, with Koizumi’s out-of-nowhere declaration that everything is suddenly fine. I found the subplot about the SOS Brigade members distrusting each other to be far more intriguing, but they didn’t really go anywhere.

The long philosophical discussions about the precise nature of Haruhi’s powers would work better if they were the focus of an episode, but they work less well wedged in between the scenes about the film. It’s also weird to take up so much time in the finale discussing something so deep without reaching any real conclusions. But perhaps part of the problem is the anachronic order of the episodes; I know this is in some ways not the real finale.

Writing: 4/10. I did laugh out loud once or twice, but most of the conversations were too vague, and the resolution to the movie plotline wasn’t very well thought out. Did the world go back to normal because filming concluded? But the film didn’t end with an assertion that everything was fictional. Did it go back to normal because of Haruhi’s voiceover? But she recorded that after Koizumi’s declaration that everything was fine. Perhaps the world was never really in as much danger as they thought?

Production: 3/10. I had serious problems with the editing. The episode felt extremely rapid-fire, like the ADHD-laden cartoons that are so popular in Western animation nowadays, but these were interspersed with slower and more philosophical conversations in a way that didn’t quite work.

There were also continuity errors:

The animation was very good, especially the expressions on Kyon’s face. Most of the voice actors were perfectly fine, but I don’t understand why Kyon sounds like he’s 40 years old2. It’s very off-putting.

Characterization: 8/10. I was very quick to pick up on Haruhi’s sharklike personality: constantly moving forward because if she stops moving she’ll drop dead, never taking no for an answer, rules are made to be broken, etc. I also got a good feeling for the three-dimensionality of Kyon and Koizumi. It was very effective for a 25-minute episode.

Accessibility: 2/10. I’m both thankful and disappointed that I knew so much about the show going into this. Thankful because I wasn’t completely lost, but disappointed because I didn’t watch the episode totally blind. I had enough trouble as it was trying to work out who was who, and still don’t understand most of what they were talking about; I can only imagine how much more insane it would have been if I had no idea about Haruhi’s powers. I might have even had trouble figuring out her name!

Closure: 3/10. This is the closure of the story about them making a film (which, according to the episode title, occupied five episodes) but doesn’t even come near trying to close out the series. But, again, in many ways this isn’t the real finale.

Do I want to watch the series now?

As I said at the start, I always did want to watch the series, because I’ve heard great things about it. This episode… was not really good enough to recommend it. My opinion hasn’t changed, and I’d still like to try it out, but now I’m a little bit more concerned that it might not be for me.

Requested By

definitively-not on Reddit

What do I know about this series going into it?

Never heard of it. While clicking through I glimpsed of the phrases “thousands of years in the future” and “a closed paradise Romdo’s”, whatever that means.

Recap

We open with dramatic music on a catwalk in the open air, where a man sitting on a throne says, “I’ve been waiting for you.”

Facing him are a man wearing a bizarre mask and a normal-looking woman. The woman asks him: “Who are you?”

“I am you and you are me,” answers the Enthroned Man. Masked Man gasps in severe pain.

“Re-I Mayer,” says Enthroned Man. “You can leave.” The world rumbles, and he snaps his fingers to project hologram computer screens into the sky. One of the screens shows the interior of a computer laboratory, where a scientist says something about “Daedalus”.

Back on the catwalk, Re-I turns and runs away from the two men. “You’ll never survive,” says Enthroned Man. She pauses, but announces that she doesn’t care: She’s doing what she needs to do. “Promise me you’ll come back, Vincent,” she tells the Masked Man who, now that I have a closer look, isn’t wearing a mask at all.

Vincent turns to Enthroned Man and his face suddenly contorts and becomes demonic. Maybe it really is some kind of mask after all?

And we go to the opening credits. I haven’t understood a word yet, so… so far so good?

We return to the scientist in the laboratory. “Deal?” she asks nobody in particular while working at the computers.

Meanwhile, on the catwalk, Enthroned Man mentions Vincent’s mask - so it is a mask - and asks him, “Did you really think you lost your memory? Maybe you never had one.”

“The world is recovering,” replies Vincent.

Enthroned Man then says something about arks and cradles, and then stands up. His face also turns into a mask. “What are we?” demands Vincent. “What are Proxies?”

“The clue is in the name,” says Enthroned Man. “We are the creator’s agents.1”

Meanwhile, Re-I has entered an elevator and is descending an enormous distance. The “dome” around them rumbles a second time. When she exits the elevator, she finds a note on the ground that reads “Dear Daddy if you read this” but nothing more.

Enthroned Man takes Vincent to the middle of the sky - probably not literally, probably just an illusion or a projection. “When our jobs are complete, when the human race begins to recover, the Proxy Elimination Program begins,” he explains. “Once a proxy has carried out his mission, he’s just a leftover monster that needs to be removed from the world.”

“So why do we have souls? Why do we suffer?” asks Vincent.

“To teach us something,” says Enthroned Man. “To teach us despair.” This is not quite an explanation.

“We loved them,” says Vincent, referring I assume to humans.

“So does the creator,” says Enthroned Man. “We want to be loved because he does. That’s why we must destroy them.” I don’t follow that logic. “You are the shadow that was taken in advance.” Something about extinguishing the human race.

“Humans led the world to collapse and ran away, which is why they needed to be destroyed,” continues Enthroned Man. “You ran away from Romdo.” I’m not following any of this. “Vincent Law is an echo, a shadow of Proxy One, an imposter.”

“You liar!” says Vincent. They start to fight, using strange, glitchy, teleporting powers.

Meanwhile, Re-I rushes to a computer terminal and discovers that all power to the dome has been shut down. “Daedalus,” she says; I don’t know who or what that is. The scientist? Enthroned Man? Something else?

During the fight, Vincent says that he doesn’t care if he was once Proxy One; he’s now Vincent.

“The people who destroyed themselves left a message,” says Enthroned Man. “And we tore it up and ran away.” What the hell are they talking about?

“Ergo Proxy is you and me,” says Vincent with realization.

Meanwhile, the scientist confronts Re-I: “You make me sick,” she says. “You’ve been forsaken. Romdo will be destroyed. This is the gods’ fight, and there’s nothing we pseudo-humans can do. Just shut our mouths like Donov did.” So they’re not humans after all… but I still have no idea what they are.

Re-I has the same goal that her grandfather did: to meet the Creator and to feel loved.

“But the Regent could only open himself to the Ergo Proxy, who was Vincent,” says the scientist. “Proxies can’t live under blue skies.”

Suddenly there’s the crying out of a bird, and the two look up to see an angel fly overheard. “Re-I 2 Real!” calls out the scientist in what is somehow both a plea and a moment of religious ecstasy. “Why are you leaving me behind?” It ignores her.

“Daedalus,” says Re-I again. I still have no idea who or what that is.

Back on the catwalk, Vincent and Enthroned Man are still battling - while all around them the pixels that make up the sky are turning off. That’s when the angel arrives: “Stop! The proxies’ job is done!”

She was moments too late; one of the two (I can’t tell which) has already physically torn out the other’s throat. But that apparently doesn’t matter? Both of the Proxies turn, recognize the angel as “Monad”, and speak to her.

“I’ve destroyed the reconstituted human race,” says Enthroned Man. “Now it’s up to you.”

Monad embraces Vincent. “I don’t want to see anyone suffer anymore. You don’t have to save this world. You can close the sacred eye.”

“You don’t have to, Monad!” says Enthroned Man. But Vincent closes his (sacred?) eyes and he and Monad vanish, leaving some kind of medallion behind. The dome rumbles again, continuing its collapse. And I still have no idea what the hell is happening.

Meanwhile, a small child runs through a subway tunnel filled with petrified human corpses, dodging them as they fall over and shatter into pieces. “They were all told not to listen to the Proxy,” she realizes. “Why am I different? Why aren’t I frozen?”

A woman with glowing red eyes named Kristeva approaches and telepathically tells the child to do what her heart tells her. The child, Pino, asks for her father; Kristeva gives her a handheld piano thing instead (we saw another one earlier, lying underneath the note that Re-I found).

Back in the lab, Re-I and the scientist - who is finally clearly identified as Daedalus - have a conversation laden with proper nouns I don’t recognize: Cogito and AutoReivs and the Proxy Plan. Daedalus, mortally wounded under rubble from the collapsing dome, explains that the Proxy Plan was actually the backup plan for the reconstitution of the human race. But the primary plan has already succeeded, which is why the backup plan (the two of them, the dome, Enthroned Man) is now being destroyed. “And you still need to face something,” she tells Re-I, giving her instructions on where to go.

Re-I apologizes and walks off, but the dying Daedalus urges her to run. She does.

Vincent opens his eyes, completing the teleport. He and Monad are in midair, and she is flying upwards, pulling him towards storm clouds. He reacts with wonder: What am I seeing? Monad identifies it as the “sacred light of the resurrection”: the sun.

Vincent reacts with pure contentment. But then he senses Re-I running on walkways through the collapsing dome and being confronted by an evil robot. “Just ignore it,” says Monad. But Vincent can’t. Somebody he cares about is in danger!

Still, that moment of uncertainty was enough to break Vincent out of Monad’s influence. “What’s so great about the kind of reality where it’s dark and cold?” she asks him.

“Because that’s our reality,” says Vincent. He takes off his mask, underneath which he looks human. He gives his amulet back to Monad. “Goodbye, Real,” he says, and lets himself fall back to Earth.

“Goodbye, my darling,” Monad replies. She resumes flying back up towards the creator, and can hear his plan. “You’re the ones who were calling me, weren’t you?” she says, and flies up to greet him. Or them. Or something.

There is a brief moment of somebody’s hand, below, and a voice begging Monad not to fly off. It’s probably Daedalus, but I’m not sure - and Monad can’t hear it anyway.

Vincent lands next to Enthroned Man, who is of course surprised to see him return. They discuss his love for Re-I - “A woman who sees the future.” Having had a change of heart, Enthroned Man tosses Vincent the amulet he left behind during the teleport. “When the sun returns, that is our end,” he tells Vincent. “Go and live. Your living will be the creator’s punishment.”

The skies begin to clear, and as they do Enthroned Man fades from existence. The dome finishes collapsing, and Re-I falls as the walkway underneath her breaks apart. “Re-I!” calls out the little girl, who is now for some reason wearing a rabbit costume. Re-I lets go, trusting that Pino will catch her. And catch her she does, while standing in the crow’s nest of what I can only describe as a bicycle-ship.

“What about Vincent?” Pino reassures Re-I that she can both see and hear him. They agree to go pick Vincent up.

Vincent, standing atop the ruins of the dome, is ready to face “the world called ‘reality’ that is being created”. The real mankind is returning, he says, and now the real fight begins.

“I am Ergo Proxy, Agent of Death!” he says proudly. His eyes glow, and the episode abruptly ends.

I have no idea what the hell that was about.

Lingering questions

• Do they rescue Vincent in time?

• What is the primary plan for reconstituting the human race, for which the Proxies’ backup plan was dismantled to make way?

• What was it that Re-I “needed to face”?

• Are Proxies like vampires, destroyed when the sun reappears?

• Why is it a punishment for the creator if Vincent lives on?

• What’s with the bicycle-ship?

• What in the world was going on here?!

Ratings

I evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.

The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; a low rating may reflect low quality, but it may also reflect a deliberate choice. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.

Story: 7/10. I can’t pretend to understand a single thing that happened, anywhere in this episode. I can’t even identify whether it depicted the end of the world, the beginning of the world, or both. But I can recognize that it effectively wove the main plot of Enthroned Man and Vincent with numerous subplots: Daedalus’s relationship with Monad, her relationship with Re-I, whatever was going on between Pino and Kristeva and that handheld piano, and so on.

At least, I think it did. I honestly don’t have a clue.

Writing: 3/10. This is much harder to judge, I think, than the story because so much of the dialog was philosophical musings that could either be nonsensical or profound. I ultimately settled on ranking it below average. Partially because it had a tendency to drag on, and partially because it posed questions and then pretended - but failed - answer them. An example: “Why do proxies suffer? To teach them something.” What’s the point of teaching them if they’re just going to be destroyed when they finish the job they were assigned to do? Why not make robots to steward the world until the humans come back?

Production: 4/10. I came away basically unimpressed, for good or for ill, with the production values. Voice acting, animation, editing were all standard; there was nothing particularly interesting but also nothing particularly bad. I am, however, docking a point for the awful grey-on-grey-on-grey color palette. It might have been justified by the circumstances2, but it was visually extremely boring.

Characterization: 4/10. There were a few hints towards three-dimensionality of the characters, but I was so thoroughly confused by everything I was seeing that I genuinely can’t tell.

Accessibility: 0/10. Definitely in contention for one of the most confusing finales I have ever watched. Sometimes I give at least point or two for being able to teach me the character names, but I can’t do that for an episode so opaque that, I’ll repeat for emphasis, I can’t even tell if the world is being created or destroyed. I have no idea who Enthroned Man is or what his goals are; who Vincent is and what his goals are; or even whether they accomplished those goals. I have no idea who Pino is, who her father is, how she is strong enough to catch a falling grown woman one-handed, or why she is piloting a bicycle-ship while wearing a rabbit costume. I don’t understand any of this!

Closure: 8/10. I mean, it kind of feels like closure? I can’t - and yes, I’m repeating myself - tell whether the world is created or destroyed at the end, but I’m pretty sure it was one of the two, and that makes for an effective finale. There are a few dangling threads, most notably the way Vincent was left almost literally hanging, and we don’t get to see Monad meet the creator and learn his “plan”. But the episode managed to at least get across the air of a conclusion despite my utter bewilderment.

Do I want to watch the series now?

How the hell am I supposed to know? I didn’t understand a word of it!

Requested By

ebbit on our Discord server and Hattakiri on Reddit

What do I know about this series going into it?

I own a copy of the opening theme song, Tank, and listen to it often.

Perhaps ironically, the only thing I know about the show’s content comes from this famous newspaper caption in which literally every word is incorrect:

If I recall correctly, “Cowboy” actually means “bounty hunter”, “BeBop” is the name of their spaceship, the character in the image is female; and the computer doesn’t belong to her.

Although I’m certain that some of what I just wrote is also incorrect.

Recap

Rain, in a graveyard. A blonde woman is holding a gun on a wild-haired man. She remembers that it was raining the last time they had met, in a city, when she was supposed to kill him. And if she had done so, she would have been free.

“Why didn’t you?” asks Wild Hair.

“Why did you love me?” She puts down the gun and embraces him. “Let’s run away together, escape from this world.”

Title screen.

In a courtyard of some kind - looks almost like a prison courtyard - a man stares in horror at dozens of dead bodies. A sinister-looking gray-haired man approaches from behind and demands a status report. “He got away,” says the subordinate. “Killed dozens of our people and fled.” “Where is Julia?” asks the superior. “I don’t know.”

From context, and since they’re talking about pursuing a fugitive, I’m guessing that Julia is the blonde from the opening scene.

The superior turns and walks away, but pauses to warn his subordinate: “Shin,” he calls back to him. “Don’t follow in Lin’s footsteps.”

Meanwhile, Blonde and Wild Hair have driven their perfectly normal-looking car into a city, to a safe house. Inside, they find a severely wounded woman named Annie. Annie reports that “they” were here, looking for Wild Hair, and did this to her. When the blonde comes in, she confirms for me that this is Julia. Wild Hair tries to treat Annie’s wound, but it’s far too late, and she dies.

Wild Hair gets angry and goes to the next room to retrieve a box full of gun parts, which he begins to assemble. As with the car and the city earlier, these look like perfectly-normal guns. I’m starting to wonder if I’m completely wrong about the presence of spaceships in this universe.

“You don’t need those to run away,” Julia points out.

“I’m going to make a scene,” says Wild Hair, and goes to the window.

Meanwhile, on Mars…

A wounded man tells a purple-haired woman that their vessel, the “Red-Tail”, won’t be mobile for a while. They also discuss a “him” (I’m guessing Wild Hair) who won’t be coming back. Wounded Man, who seems to have a cybernetic implant under his eye, asks Purple Hair what Julia was like. “A dangerous woman, like a devilish angel or an angelic devil,” she answers.

Meanwhile, outside the safe house, a car explodes - the precursor to a bunch of agents bursting in. A shootout ensues, during which Wild Hair and Julia flee to the fire escape and onto an adjacent roof. Wild Hair is a much better shot, killing dozens of agents during his retreat; the agents themselves are under classic Stormtrooper rules.

But there are just too many of them, and one of them manages to hit Julia in the back. In slow motion, she falls to the rooftop.

Wild Hair drops his gun and rushes over to her. She mouths something entirely inaudible and dies. The camera zooms dramatically in on Wild Hair’s eye: He wants revenge.

On some other planet, Wounded Man lands his spaceship outside the home of an old shaman. He emerges and asks the shaman, “Where is Spike?” The shaman is not very helpful, giving metaphors about sand and stars disappearing and reappearing and replacing one another. He refers to Wounded Man as “Running Rock” and warns him that he will die soon. “Do not fear your death,” he tells Running Rock. “Or it will come upon you suddenly. If you do not show fear, Death will be gentle.”

Meanwhile, the agents combing through the safe house bring their report to the grey-haired Superior, whose name is Sir Vicious (subtle). They found Julia’s coat, covered in blood; she will not be able to leave the planet.

Running Rock wakes up in his (house? spaceship?) to discover Wild Hair standing over him. His real name turns out to be Spike, and he asks for some food; he good-naturedly ribs Running Rock for being a terrible cook. As he eats, he tells Running Rock a fable about a striped cat that died and came back to life a million times, until he finally found a white cat whom he loved. They spent many years together until her death, after which the striped cat cried a million times and died for good. This is obviously a metaphor for Spike and Julia1, but they both treat it as a known, famous parable. Spike says he hates the story because he hates cats. If so, shouldn’t he like a story where a cat dies miserable and alone?

Running Rock asks if Spike is doing all he’s doing for Julia, but Spike admits she is dead. He gets up to leave, but that’s when Purple Hair shows up and points a gun at his head. “You’re tied to your past!” she accuses. He says something about having an artificial eye that means he sees the past and present simultaneously.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t follow that part at all.

Purple Hair admits to Spike that her memory came back, but that she ultimately had nowhere to return to. There’s no elaboration; I speculate that she had an amnesia-driven arc, trying to find out who she was and where she came from, only to discover that her family and/or home planet are long gone.

“You’re going to throw your life away?!” she accuses.

“I’m not going there to die,” he says (I still don’t know where “there” is). I’m going there to see if I’m still alive.” He walks off. She points her gun at him again in fury, but can’t bring herself to kill him; instead she fires into the air in frustration.

In a montage, Running Rock cleans his house (what?) while Spike and Purple Hair fly the repaired Red Tail off into the distance. He flashes back to various events in the series, including when he worked for Sir Vicious and when he slept with Julia.

It’s nighttime when Spike walks, alone, into the lobby of an organization with a dragon emblem. As they gape at him for daring to walk openly into the lion’s den, he drops and kicks over a grenade, then under cover of the explosion and smoke shoots his way into an elevator.

The mooks are, of course, still terrible shots. But one of them finally does manage to wound him when Spike leaves him literally no other choice.

Spike is about to enter another elevator when Shin emerges. They point their guns at one another, but it turns out Shin is changing sides. They join forces and continue shooting their way down hallways, but Shin is very quickly killed. His dying words: “Kill Vicious. I wanted you to come back.”

Spike reaches the rooftop office, where Vicious is waiting at the top of a staircase. They face each other, and Vicious declares: “I am the only one who can kill you.”

Luckily for Spike, he’s the one with the gun. He takes careful aim and fires.

And misses.

He charges up the stairs and at Vicious, who throws a knife into Spike’s shoulder. Spike ignores the wound and closes the distance between them, after which he continues to fire his gun (why did he not shoot safely, from a distance?). After trading sword wounds a few times, Spike finally admits to Vicious that Julia is dead - and shoots him point-blank.

Flashback to Julia saying she had a bad dream.

The wounded Spike goes back down the stairs, where Vicious’s henchmen are all waiting. He points a finger, says “Bang” sarcastically, and collapses on the stairs, dead. The camera pans upwards and the credits roll.

After the credits, a caption: “You’re gonna carry that weight.”

Lingering questions

• Does this represent victory or defeat? Was Spike trying to kill Vicious for entirely personal reasons or because he wanted to take down his organization? Did he succeed?

• When and how will Running Rock die? What was the shaman hinting to? Doesn’t the manner of Spike’s death disprove the Shaman’s theory that Death will be gentle to those who do not run from it?

• What is Purple Hair going to do next with her life?

Ratings

I evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.

The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; a low rating may reflect low quality, but it may also reflect a deliberate choice. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.

Story: 4/10. A simple but well-executed story. Julia and Spike join forces; she dies; he seeks revenge.

Or is it? The conversations and flashbacks make clear that Julia and Spike were together (in some capacity) long before the opening scene in which she is pointing a gun at him. So if the “join forces” part happened some time ago, what rift in their relationship was so serious that she seemed ready to kill him, yet not so serious that she couldn’t immediately embrace him and convince him to return to her side?

This is a question borne of curiosity, not criticism. I’m bringing it up because I recognize that the classic revenge plot doesn’t wholly match what I’m seeing. There’s more to the story than that.

Despite this, I’m rating the plot slightly below average because the subplots seemed lacking. Annie’s death is clearly a major event, but without the context of the rest of the series it is devoid of meaning. Running Rock is warned not to run from death, but “runs from” (i.e., does not participate in) Spike’s assault on the dragon building, and we never see if the shaman’s warning comes true. Shin is warned not to go the way of Lin (whoever that was) and does so anyway - for unknown reasons that must have appeared in previous episodes.

The only exception is Purple Hair. To some extent I was able to recognize what the show was doing with her; more on this later.

I’m drawing a very fine distinction here that I should make explicit. If a finale contains events I don’t understand, that doesn’t affect the rating; I assume those events are executed as competently as the events I do understand. But if the finale relies on previous events I don’t understand (and the events are not themselves present in the episode), then no matter how well executed they are I can’t give this specific episode credit for them. The series clearly featured a depth of story that led to the finale’s climactic shootout2 - but the finale had little more than the climactic shootout.

Writing: 7/10. I’m very literal-minded, which means I tend to have a lot of trouble with metaphor-laden or vague conversations like the one between Spike and Purple Hair. What did she mean when she kept saying he was tied to his past? What did he mean when he said he wants to find out if he’s still alive? What was all that nonsense about his artificial eye?

But somehow, growing organically from that conversation, I think I got a vague shape of what they were discussing. Purple Hair wants Spike to just forget about Vicious. He killed Julia? He did whatever unknown other evil things in previous episodes? He is still trying to hunt you down? Who cares, says Purple Hair. It’s a big universe out there. You can just leave. Hakuna Matata3.

But Spike doesn’t want to just ignore it. He wants revenge, and is fully prepared to give his life to achieve it.

All of this, by rights, belongs under the Characterization section below. But I’m placing it here to give praise to the writing: that it was able to get these concepts through my thick skull without making them too explicit. I understood that Purple Hair vanishing from the story was not a plot hole; it was an important part of differentiating her character, her ideals, from Spike’s.

The cat fable, which I found similarly confusing, also became clear over time, and Annie’s death scene managed to communicate her importance to the story even though I lacked the context for it.

Production: 7/10. I was disappointed not to get to see the song “Tank” in context, but the rest of the music was great. The voice acting was very good.

The animation was high quality for its time, but I’m annoyed that there was no effort whatsoever to make Spike’s surviving the various shootouts even the slightest bit plausible. There was also a John Woo-style overuse of birds during the death scenes.

The montage was really good. It started as a classic travel montage intercut with flashbacks, but didn’t end with Spike’s arrival at the dragon building the way I expected it to. Instead, the music continued into his assault on the dragon building. This perfectly reflected Purple Hair’s accusation and Spike’s sort-of defense: He’s got one eye in the past and one eye in the present. To him, whether he’s in a flashback or a battle, the same music is playing.

Characterization: 8/10. There’s clearly a lot happening inside the characters’ minds; I discussed most of that above. Previous episodes must have explored that complex history, and (unlike the Plot category) here I do give credit to the finale for hinting that those elements exist.

I didn’t discuss Purple Hair earlier because it wasn’t relevant to the plot, so now’s my chance. I’m curious if her memory loss is part of the reason she opposes Spike’s approach so strongly. If you have no past, it’s easier to dismiss the grip that another person’s past might have on them. All the more so if (as I suspect) she thought she had no past, recovered it… and discovered it was worthless anyway.

Accessibility: 6/10. I learned who most of the characters are, with Purple Hair as a major exception (though I also suspect Running Rock isn’t his real name).

The plot was easy to grasp, but I’m still missing a lot of background: the “why” rather than the “what”. What sort of organization does Vicious actually run? Why is he hunting Julia? Why did Spike defect? Just out of love, or were there also ideological reasons? What about Shin’s defection? Who was Lin? Who was the shaman?

Closure: 7/10. Five of the main characters are dead. A lot of questions remain, but the story of Spike, Julia, and Vicious is essentially over.

Do I want to watch the series now?

I think I do. It’s a little bit hard to be sure - sometimes a finale is not entirely representative of the series, and I’m getting that impression here - but the characters seem complex enough to pique my interest, and the story deep enough to pique my curiosity.

Hattakiri on Reddit

What do I know about this series going into it?

I previously did the finale of Yohane the Parhelion: Sunshine in the Mirror, requested by the same reader. I am given to understand that the two series feature alternate versions of the same characters.

Given how little I understood of that finale, I don’t expect it to provide any help with figuring out this one.

Recap

An orange-haired girl runs downstairs with excitement. “I’m finished, I’m finished, I’m finished!” she cries out, explaining to two friends that she has finally written the speech that she will be giving for their upcoming graduation ceremony. She runs out of the house, a rush of bubbles and hyperactivity.

Her friends lament that “Honoka-san” didn’t even notice their new clothing. But immediatelythere’s a knock on the door: Honoka is back “I forgot to mention, you look great! Fight!”

The opening credits identify her full name as Honoka Kosaka and the school’s name as Otonokizaka.

The three girls arrive at school and call out to another girl, Nico-chan. When she turns around, however, it turns out to be Nico’s mother - something that shocks the other girls in an overly exaggerated fashion. As they’re gawking at their mistake, Nico emerges from the school’s side door and grabs her mother by the arm, enthusiastically telling her to come and (something, I don’t know what). But when she discovers her friends have arrived, she is embarrassed and immediately composes herself.

Nico leads the friends inside to one of the rooms (probably the student council meeting room or some such). She’s prepared a banner in celebration of some kind of victory they’ve had. Is this the same thing Honoka told her friends to “Fight” in the opening scene? Was there a timeskip I didn’t notice, during which Honoka’s friends took part in some kind of competition? I don’t think that’s possible; this seems like it’s the same day.

Nico then informs Honoka that “Umi” neglected to tell her that the student council (of which Honoka is president) was supposed to be meeting two hours before graduation, and that Honoka was supposed to be there.

Honoka meets Umi, who asks: Have you written your speech yet?

Honoka then runs into another friend, Nozomi. She praises Nozomi’s hairstyle and, as usual, starts to run off again. “Have you seen Eli?” Nozomi asks. Honoka doesn’t bother to stop or turn around; she runs (not even jogs - runs!) in place as she answers.

Honoka soon finds Eli in an abandoned classroom, reminiscing about when she had been student council president before Honoka, and how she couldn’t breathe from the pressure. Honoka embraces and reassures her: the volume of responsibilities you left for me when I replaced you helped me cope with the pressure, because I could tell that you loved the school.

As they leave, Nozomi is lying in wait outside. Honoka, as usual, runs off; Nozomi and Eli mention that she has truly become student council president now1.

At the graduation ceremony, an adult - probably the principal - thanks the students for their efforts. She particularly thanks them for ensuring that the school will be accepting new students next year. Interesting. Was the school in danger of closing and the students saved it in some way?

Then Honoka gets up before the crowd and congratulates everyone for graduating. “I’m not very good at writing speeches!” she says. Is this what she wrote? “I’ve never been good at thinking before I speak”; she kept hurting people’s feelings inadvertently. But then she discovered songs, which can help you communicate! So, as another girl sits at the piano, Honoka sings that she loves everyone, hooray!

The audience join in the song and somehow know all the words (though in fairness most of them are “La”).

The “Love Live” title screen shows up immediately after this song - halfway through the episode - so I can see where the subtitler got confused.

After the ceremony, the students return to what I thought was the student council room prior to the Eli scene and what I now think is just a random room. They’re shocked to discover that all the banners and trophies and things in the room are gone; earlier, one of the girls was told to take home what belonged to them and it turns out all of it belonged to them.

“Hanayo” is told to stand around in a crown and a red cape, in order to make the club (what club?) “lively”. I have no idea what this is about, but they appeal to her and she finally relents to being the student council president. So this is the student council room after all? I’m hopelessly confused, especially when they declare that “Rin” is the leader (apparently not the same thing as the president). Hanayo also turns the tables on the one who appointed her president, to her chagrin making her vice president.

The girls go outside, where Honoka makes a fatal mistake by mentioning that this is “the last time” the group will be together. You said the forbidden words! Now you have to buy juice for everybody!

As they drink their juice, they poke fun at Honoka’s diet and go visit a pair of llamas that are on the school grounds for… some reason. They discover one is pregnant.

After visiting a couple of other locations they finally go onto the school roof, which was the group had gathered at first to practice singing every day. Honoka decides as a last gesture to paint the word “μ’s” on the roof in soap water.

Okay. This has been mentioned several times, but I had no context for it until now. There are two clubs: the student council and “μ’s”, which is a competitive choir of some kind2.

As the others leave, Honoka stays on the roof and flashes back to important conversations from throughout the series, featuring the students laughing together, arguing together, scolding her for being off tempo, and so on. Then she flashes to the very beginning, when they first decide to use this space (the roof), where there will be no shade from the sun or protection from the rain, but at least they don’t have to worry about the noise bothering anybody else. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” say her flashback friends, “and we’ll see it through to the end.” Present-day Honoka replies with a smile: We did see it through to the end.

After the closing credits, walking with her friends, Hanayo gets an alert on her phone. It’s an emergency! We have to go back to the club room!

Okay, it’s a bit late, but I finally understand that the room with all the banners and trophies was the choir meeting room, which they only got after (I assume) enough success to get official recognition. And the room where Honoka met Eli was the actual student council room.

The girls all run back to the school crying out, “It’s an emergency, it’s an emergency!” but the emergency is not explained. Following this is a second set of closing credits.

Then there’s a second set of closing credits.

After the final final credits, Honoka addresses the audience directly: Come with us to somewhere you’ve never been! Make everyone’s dreams come true!

Lingering questions

• What’s the emergency?

• Where are the various students going next year? Colleges? Jobs?

Ratings

I evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.

The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; a low rating may reflect low quality, but it may also reflect a deliberate choice. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.

Story: 2/10. The end of a school-centered series almost never has a plot. Usually it’s all about the bittersweet goodbyes: the students reminisce about the time they had together and bid each other farewell. The low score is not a criticism and shouldn’t be taken as such; it’s characteristic of the genre.

There was a lot less farewell in this episode than I expected, probably because of the passing-the-baton aspects of the story. The very large number of characters made it difficult to tell who was graduating and who would still be attending school next year (such as Hanayo, chosen to be president of one of the two clubs, though damned if I know which).

Writing: 4/10. I’m giving the benefit of the doubt to a certain extent here (which I know is a bit mean to say if I’m grading it below average). There didn’t seem to be much essence to what anybody was saying or doing in the episode. The scene that stood out the most was Honoka reassuring Eli; the “overload of responsibilities showing how much you love the school” was a nice little moment. The rest of the episode was just too much bubble, not enough substance.

Production: 7/10. The animation was very good, especially the lighting effects. The voice acting was also above par. And I liked the music and the singing a lot better than in Yohane the Parhelion.

Characterization: 5/10. I got enough hints as to the characters’ personalities to get some small feel for who and what they are. It was easy to get a handle on Honoka, constantly running a marathon even while standing still; other small moments involving Nico and Hanayo showed a bit of depth. Ultimately, though, I’m grading this almost entirely on vibes; the episode was simply too short, and I was never able to keep anybody’s names or faces straight.

Accessibility: 3/10. Gah. I get that it’s graduation day and (at the very end) that there are two clubs of importance I should be aware of. But the only characters I could possibly recognize are Honoka, Nico, and Nozomi - and even those I’m only about 60% sure. Way too many characters in way too short a time; my addled brain never stood a chance at following it.

Closure: 6/10. Graduation day is a natural place to close out a series, but it’s undermined by a lack of exploration into what the characters will be doing next year (presumably provided in previous episodes) and the sudden and unexplained “it’s an emergency” at the very end that is not followed up on. I do see that they made a movie afterwards, so presumably that’s what the movie will be about.

Do I want to watch the series now?

It’s not a knock on the series to say that this is very much not my genre.

If I were interested in the genre, I honestly don’t know if I would be interested in this specific one or not. I feel like I got too little of a handle on things, and the finale episode is probably very different from what the rest of the series was about.

AlienAtSystem on Discord

What do I know about this series going into it?

Never heard of it. It is Chinese.

Recap

The opening credits show swooping CGI views over various buildings; a man standing in water; a woman holding a sword; a seated ruler overlooking troops; more people holding swords; a man on a horse as arrows fly past; a Go board. They end by saying that this series was adapted from a novel.

We open on a battle. Our focus is on a woman using magic powers and a magic extending ribbon to send her melee opponents flying. But there are archers in the distance who fire a large number of arrows; a man on the battlefield cries out “Fengxi!” and leaps towards the woman, intercepting all the arrows with his body. He falls to the ground, dead.

The archers prepare another volley, but another man flies through the air and uses his own magic powers to return the arrows to where they came from. The archers all die.

Somewhere nearby, a messenger updates a general on the state of the battle. He orders his troops to withdraw.

We return to the battle, where Fengxi runs up to the man who died to save her. “Pu’er!” she cries out. Turns out he’s not quite dead yet, but very much on his way there. “Ever since you saved my life, I’ve been looking for a way to repay you,” he gasps out. “This is my chance.”

Another man, Mr. Feng, kneels down besides them and blames himself. “I came too late.” Pu’er begs him to take care of his “Martial Sister”, whom I assume is Fengxi. He closes his eyes and dies.

“Han Pu!” cries out Feng.

“Pu’er!” cries out Fengxi1. She sobs over Pu’er’s body, as we flash back to her memories of Pu as a child.

After the flashbacks, we skip to sometime after the battle2, with Fengxi and Feng burying Pu in the battlefield. They eulogize him at length.

During the eulogies, I have a few brief moments to wonder: do Fengxi and Feng’s names imply familial relation? I’m going to assume they’re brother and sister until proven otherwise.

Fengxi recalls that Pu wanted to open an apothecary after the war. She promises she will accomplish his dream. By opening an apothecary?

Later, Fengxi addresses her troops, who pledge allegiance to her.

Actually, that last guy belongs to the Moyu Cavalry, whatever that is, and he kneels immediately afterwards to pledge his unit’s loyalty as well. Fengxi announces that she is renaming a nearby mountain Mount Ying, after somebody (Pu? Somebody else?) who died in the battle.

A rider comes with news: Dong Shufang’s army has been spotted 3km from here! Fengxi and her troops set out.

We cut to another battle, with people again using magic powers to fly through the air and send each other flying as well. Fengxi - ah, so this is a timeskip, not happening elsewhere - locates the general on the battlefield and confronts him personally. They agree to a duel to settle the matter between their armies, but for some reason don’t do anything to stop the other soldiers fighting around them. Maybe they simply mean they will fight each other one on one, with nobody else interfering? If so, they didn’t bother telling the other soldiers about it.

It doesn’t matter, though, because within three seconds she has comically sliced off all the connecting bits of his armor, and it comically flies3 away from his body. Then she stabs him.

But rather than lament his death, he gloats. “Yu Wuyuan knew you would come here. Artillery will rain, and your men will all die with me!”

She barely notices the threat and stabs him again, then says, “Pu’er, I have avenged you.”

But that’s when the aforementioned artillery come into play: cannonballs and explosions all over the battlefield, and a lot of Fengxi’s troops are dying4.

Fengxi flies up into the air to get a good vantage point, and spots the cannons. She throws her sword into one of the cannons just as it is about to fire, and it explodes - destroying all of the other artillery but also severely injuring Fengxi herself. She starts to fall.

“We have to stop Yu Wuyuan’s plan and save (somebody whose name I didn’t catch),” says a narrator. It seems we’ve cut to another battle - not an active one, but a siege, at a place called Dadong. The besieging army demands that Wuyuan to be brought out to them, but the leader of the besieged mocks them:

But for some reason this actually does distress the narrator, who is the leader of the besieging army. “Wuyuan is the secret mastermind,” he says in a voiceover. “He wants to take over the whole world. That’s why he stayed hidden by my side all that time.” He orders his troops to retreat.

Elsewhere, a horse-drawn carriage is barrelling down a forest trail. Inside, Feng is cradling the dying Fengxi. He takes her to visit “Old Master Tianji”, where he asks to use the “Life Transference technique of Tianshan the Snow” to save her. Tianji warns him that this will mean giving up all but ten years of Feng’s life, but Feng readily agrees.

That night, Fengxi wakes up in bed. “Lanxi,” she calls out as she gets up. She calls out that name a few times, searching, until she finds him outside.

Lanxi, it seems, is an elf with rounded ears. He asks if she dislikes his white hair, and she embraces him. Aha: I didn’t recognize him with the change in hair color, but this is Feng. He has white hair now, thanks to having given up most of his life to save her.

“Do I look more mature than I did before?” he asks.

She is distraught at the fact that he gave up so much of his life for her, but he says he couldn’t wake up if she wasn’t in the world, and that giving up his lifespan to save her was ultimately a selfish act.

He also has news: Huang Chao failed to take the Imperial City. Yu Wuyuan is still there, holding 100,000 civilians hostage.

Tianji arrives and tells the two of them a secret: contrary to what they thought, it wasn’t just 7 people who founded the Dadong Empire, but 8. Yu Yantian was the eighth, but he disappeared; Emperor Weilie killed Yantian and all his family except for one surviving son, who tried to munity a hundred years ago. There’s a connection between this and Yu Wuyuan; I guess Wuyuan wants to avenge his ancestors and take back what he feels his rightfully his.

We return to the Imperial Palace at Dadong, the same place as before. The besiegers have returned, making their earlier decision to retreat rather unnecessary. But this time Fangxi is with them, flying through the battlefield.

I don’t know what changed between then and now, but this time they do decide to attack despite the very real danger they might kill their enemies. This battle, too, lasts only three seconds; we cut straight to Fangxi, Fang, and someone I don’t recognize entering the throne room to confront Yu Wuyuan, alone.

Yu does his contractual villainous rant: “The emperor swore he would share this peaceful world with the Yu family! But he erased my family as soon as he ascended the throne! A servant rescued a one-month-old baby. Did Dadong fail me? Did the world fail me?”

“You plunged the world into chaos!” Fangxi retorts. “You’re doing the same thing Weilie did!” There’s something about members of the Yu family living no longer than 30 years, perhaps some sort of magic.

The third person is identified as one Huang Chao. He’s here to confront Yu about another member of the Huang family, who had come here to find Yu and never came back. Yu admits - nay, gloats - that she is dead. “She loved you!” Huang Chao cries out in pain and anger.

Fang comes forward with his own accusation: You approached the emperor to cure your Blood Curse (which explains the 30 years thing) and this caused chaos (somehow).

Also, Yu killed Fangxi’s master because he “knew too much” - but that’s as far as I got in this conversation. At this point I’m drowning in a sea of names and accusations. It’s a relief when Yu finally announces: “Enough talking. Let’s finish this now.”

He draws his sword and they start to fight, flying all over the place. It’s not very long before the two Fangs draw blood, but he uses his powerful control over the wind to throw them away5.

Fang grabs Fangxi and reminds her that Master Tianji said that it takes “two connected souls” to “reach the highest level”. We have to attack him together! (Which is not meaningfully different from how they’ve been attacking him so far.) The three of them fly up through the ceiling and into the atmosphere; swords and wind are thrown around for a few seconds until finally Fang and Fangxi manage to throw Yu straight back down, into the throne room, where he hits the ground hard. He spits up blood and dies.

The three victors - Fang, Fangxi, and Huang - walk out of the throne room, leaving the dead body behind. They come before the emperor (a new emperor? the already existing one? I dunno). He hands them a scroll and, in doing so, it seems he intends to abdicate and divide the world between the three of them.

A great idea that worked so well for Rome.

They take their leave of the emperor, and Huang Chao thanks the Fangs for helping him discover Yu’s plan before it was too late. He doesn’t want to start another war, so he refuses to take his third of the empire; he’ll let the two of them rule the world. “But if you do not keep the world at peace, I will hunt you down.”

But they turn the tables on him and hand him the scroll, making him sole emperor instead. “I only have 10 years remaining,” explains Fang, and he wants to spend them with Fangxi. Huang accepts this, and pledges that as long as he lives he will keep the world peaceful. They turn his words back at him: If you don’t, we will hunt you down.

Fang and Fangxi come flying in onto a stage, before which their army is waiting.

She announces that she is abdicating her noble title, and jokingly says that she is kidnapping Fang to be her husband; if anybody comes after him to rescue him, she’ll kill them. Fang follows up by pointing out two generals and telling the army to obey them from now on, and they fly away.

One of the two generals comes up to the stage and reads from a scroll. “I felt the compassion of Chao,” she says, “and he will be a wise leader who will not sacrifice people needlessly or make people suffer for peace.” She, too, is leaving and orders the troops to obey Huang Chao. A sudden narrator explains that this is how the Huang dynasty began.

Finally, in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, Fangxi is cooking. Fang gently mocks her for having soot on her nose. He draws her eyebrows with an eyebrow pencil, and she returns the favor. The camera pulls back to show them living in peace.

Lingering questions

• Does Huang keep his promise?

• Does Fang have the full ten years?

Ratings

I evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.

The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; a low rating may reflect low quality, but it may also reflect a deliberate choice. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.

Story: 3/10. Very simple, almost too simple. There were a lot of references to Yu’s plotting, which may or may not have been highly complex and sophisticated - but this episode merely depicted the good guys showing up to kill the bad guys and doing so almost effortlessly.

Writing: 2/10. This is the caliber of dialogue we’re dealing with:

The writers didn’t bother to make the battles interesting or exciting; in every case you had a few brief shots of people flying around and then suddenly either all of the bad guys are dead or we’ve cut to a scene that takes place much later. The most egregious of these was the second siege of the Dadong, during which (so far as I can tell) nothing was meaningfully different from the first siege but somehow the good guys have already made it inside.

Production: 3/10. Two and a half of these points belong to the actress playing Fengxi, who is fantastic. Her lines were delivered meaningfully and realistically; her sobbing over Pu’s body was literally the best on-screen crying I have ever seen in my life.

The music wasn’t bad, and the flying effects were decent but far overused. But almost everything else was awful. Tianji is a terrible actor and none of the others sold their characters very well; the CGI is far below what we have a right to expect in 2022; and the editing made a hash of what was already a very choppy script. Even the captions got into the act, needlessly repeating “Tomb of beloved brother Han Pu” every single time the lettering could be seen in the background.

Characterization: 1/10. I know literally nothing about any of the characters on the screen.

Accessibility: 6/10. I was extremely confused at the names being thrown around, but ultimately didn’t need to understand any of that to follow the episode. The white-clad heroine faces the black-clad villain and defeats him. It’s that simple.

Closure: 10/10. The bad guy is dead, and the good guys have retired. With the lack of side plots, I couldn’t identify any left unresolved.

Do I want to watch the series now?

No. This was genuinely terrible.

Requested By

Which_War_8150 on Reddit

What do I know about this series going into it?

It’s an animated parody of reality TV shows. Every season is essentially a different story told with the same characters. I’ve previously done the finale of Total Dramarama, in which the characters are preschoolers.

Recap

An announcer declares that it’s the finale of Total Drama Island. He introduces us to the three remaining contestants:

• Caleb, who was voted off first, way back at the beginning of the series, but for some reason was allowed to rejoin. Since then he has fallen in love with one of the other contestants, but she was exiled by…

• Julia, the token evil contestant who also betrayed and exiled her best friend.

• Wayne, a complete imbecile who at one point ate his own socks.

We open on the three, bickering on a beach. Caleb is shouting at Julia for having sent Priya (his girlfriend) off the island. Wayne is shouting just because the others are shouting and he likes making noise.

In cutaway scenes, each contestant tells the camera what they’re thinking. Caleb wants to take the million dollars and give it all away to one million charities ($1 each). Julia wants to invest the money in a podcast called “Get Over Yourself”, where she and her best friend invite a famous person on, only to ignore the guest and talk to or about each other1. Whereas Wayne completely forgot there even was a prize.

As part of introducing the final challenge, they’ve brought back all of the eliminated contestants from across the series, and they all get to choose which team to be on. Caleb has five teammates, including his girlfriend Priya; none of the other four like him very much, they just want to make sure Julia loses. Wayne has six teammates who basically think he’s the greatest. And Julia only has one teammate - the BFF whom she betrayed - making for an awkward reunion. Why the BFF would want to help the person who betrayed her isn’t entirely explained.

The task has three parts. First they have to pull a wagon up a mountain, then they have to cross a gorge on a tightrope, then they have to use a glider to fly back down to the dock they started from. Fastest wins.

But there’s a twist: the teammates aren’t here to help you; they’ll be in the wagon that you’re pulling. That gives Julia, only pulling one person, a massive advantage and she pulls ahead - despite her BFF’s passive-agressive sabotage. Priya is overly demanding, pushing Caleb to exhaustion. And Wayne’s cart is so heavy that his first attempt to walk just digs into the ground in place. Even when he does manage to progress, his friend Zee notices the pizza that has been put on the path as a distraction, and he and Wayne forget about the race.

Julia makes it to the gorge long in advance of the others and begins to cross. The announcer is there, handing out T-shirt cannons to the teammates; they’re to be used to shoot at the contestants and knock them off the tightrope. BFF gets one, but with nobody else here yet there’s nobody to shoot at. The field is clear for Julia to cross.

Suddenly a creepy woman appears, a former contestant who “doesn’t play well with others” and therefore wasn’t invited back like everyone else. She steals the T-shirt cannon and shoots Julia, knocking her off the tightrope and into the gorge, forcing her to climb back up and start over.

While Julia is doing so, Caleb reaches the tightrope. He starts to cross, but his friends shout unhelpful advice until he finally loses his balance and falls.

Julia tries again to cross, but Caleb’s team fires T-shirts at her and knock her back into the gorge. There she encounters a dragon, which the production placed in the gorge as an additional challenge. It bites off half her hair, which infuriates her. She beats up the dragon in a fury and runs back up to the tightrope, easily catching up to Caleb.

While they’re halfway across, Wayne finally catches up. His friends grab their T-shirt cannons and fire at Julia, but she leaps forward, clear over Caleb and all the rest of the way over the gorge. And the t-shirts hit Caleb and knock him off the tightrope.

Julia reaches the cliff, where there is a trio of flying squirrel suits waiting. She has to put one on, leap off, and glide down to the dock.

Back at the gorge, Caleb’s friends take aim at Wayne but can’t bring themselves to shoot at him because he’s such a great guy. Instead, though, it’s Wayne’s friends that shoot him because they want their pal to get the free t-shirts. He falls into the gorge but is thrilled. T-shirts!

Finally, Caleb makes it across the gorge and reaches the cliff - where Julia is still trying to amass the courage to jump. His arrival, however, finally gives her the motivation she needed and she leaps - immediately plummeting as she tries desperately to flap her squirrel wings. Caleb puts on his squirrel suit and glides down to her2, telling her to stop flapping and glide!

In the cutaway, Caleb explains to the camera that he wasn’t going to let Julia fall and die. I’m sorry, I’m a good person! Oh shit, don’t tell Priya I said that.

As they glide side by side, Julia makes Caleb an offer: no more fighting, no more sabotaging, whoever gets there first wins. Caleb immediately agrees, and as soon as he drops his guard she punches him and makes him fall.

Wayne, meanwhile, decides to forget trying to walk the tightrope. Instead he’ll try to pole-vault over the gorge. He fails miserably, landing in the middle of the tightrope, which stretches and launches him into the distance.

Obviously he’ll land directly on the dock before Caleb and Julia reach it, for the victory.

Meanwhile, Caleb has recovered and crashes into Julia as revenge. The two of them fall straight down, through the trees, and land on the forest floor. They strip off their gliding suits and start running to the finish line.

As they run, the announcer notices something: it’s Wayne, who has appeared out of nowhere, flying through the air in a squirrel suit. Turns out he had landed on the cliff where the suits were.

As Julia and Caleb race to the docks, Wayne tucks his wings in so he can go into freefall - and he makes it to the finish line first.

In cutaway scenes, Caleb expresses worry that Priya won’t love him anymore because he didn’t win - and is surprised when she gives him a big kiss; Julia expresses bafflement as to why lying and cheating didn’t make her win; and Wayne acknowledges that his victory was a total fluke.

The contestants, present and past, are brought together for a closing ceremony; one random guy interrupts it to demand marshmallows. Wayne is presented with the money but is more enthused by the canoe it’s stored in. One of his friends reminds him that he can use the money to buy a bus for his hockey team - nay, two buses, so they can get everywhere twice as fast.

The host, named Chris, closes things out by talking directly to the camera. He laments that despite all the drama someone always ends up happy, and expresses the hope that the next season will fix that.

Lingering questions

• Why does Julia’s BFF still hang around with her, and will she continue to do so now that the show has ended?

Ratings

I evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.

The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; a low rating may reflect low quality, but it may also reflect a deliberate choice. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.

Story: 3/10. A very simple and predictable story; I guessed Wayne would be the ultimate winner immediately upon his introduction and never wavered from that guess for a moment. There were a couple of character-driven subplots (the creepy woman and the Priya/Caleb relationship) but these were rudimentary at best.

Writing: 5/10. About average for television. A handful of jokes that made me laugh out loud; I’m sure there were many that went over my head because I’m not very familiar with the reality TV tropes that it is spoofing. I liked how the interview cutaways in the outhouse violated causality. The scene at the gorge was a bit too long; if my description above feels repetitive, know that I even left some of it out.

Production: 6/10. Good voice acting. Good use of editing, especially in the cutaways. The animation style is odd; it works fine for what it does, I’m just not that big a fan.

Characterization: 4/10. Most of the characters were broad caricatures rather than well-fleshed out people. There were two bright spots, though: the way BFF remained allied with but nevertheless constantly sniped at Julia, and the way Caleb’s assumptions of how and why Priya was interested in him turned out to be unfounded.

Accessibility: 9/10. This type of broad-strokes parody was never going to be difficult to understand, and thanks to the reality TV format the host introduced all the main characters by name at the very start. I was never confused.

Closure: 8/10. A natural end to a reality TV series is when one of the contestants wins the grand prize. I get the feeling that not all of the characters really wrapped their stories up much, however - in particular the creepy woman, who mostly leaves the plot after scaring off all the monsters in the gorge. I think she and others still have a bit more story to tell.

Do I want to watch the series now?

Having never watched reality TV - including the Survivor-style shows upon which this one is based - it’s clear I’m not the target audience for this. It was pretty funny, but not enough to really draw me in.

Electrical-Host6341 and pussyslayer on Reddit

What do I know about this series going into it?

It stars Nathan Fielder (of Nathan For You, which I’ve previously done) and Emma Stone. I saw brief glimpses of the description while clicking through: something about newlyweds and eco-friendly living.

Recap

We open on a cooking show called “Rachael [sic]”, with special guest Vincent Pastore, who wrote the Wise Guys Cookbook.

I’m already wondering where is this going.

“Vin”, as she calls him, is going to finish cooking the antipast; in the meantime Rachael introduces (via video feed) the stars of a reality show called The Green Queen, Whitney and Asher Siegel, played by Stone and Fielder, respectively. Whitney is pregnant, and reaction shots of the studio audience show everybody wearing coronavirus-era masks.

Whitney explains that modern homes are built badly, especially the way heat leaks in and out through the basement. If you built your home on a foam foundation, you wouldn’t need an air conditioner.

Rachael points out, however, that not everyone can afford to knock their home down and rebuild it in its entirety. What else do you recommend? Whitney seems at a loss for a few moments - apparently this eco-house tip is all she had in her quiver - before dredging up an anodyne lesson that we were all taught in elementary school: you waste less water if you limit your showers to five minutes.

After which Rachael returns to the cooking portion of her show: Vin sings while stirring the meatballs, Rachael hawks “Josey Bamboo”-brand compostable cleaning wipes, and Whitney and Asher sit grinning awkwardly on the video screen behind them.

I honestly have no idea what’s going on here. Is the entire episode going to have this bizarre framing?

Just when I start asking myself that, Rachael closes out the show with one last plug of the book and thanks the “Green Queens”, season one of whose show is on the HGTV streaming service.

We cut to the Siegels’ home, where they are still staring and grinning awkwardly at the camera until the camerawoman announces the end of filming. “Do I have permission to touch you?” she bizarrely asks each of them before removing their mics. While they are being de-micced, Nathan wonders if Rachael had ever actually watched their show or was just briefed on it, while Whitney laments that she didn’t mention the pregnancy1.

Later that night,2 Asher says the blessing over lighting the Shabbat candles (using the tune for lighting Chanukah candles) and says the blessing on the challah (despite not having first said the blessing on wine or washing his hands). He reminds Whitney not to use her phone.

She’s still upset about how the TV spot didn’t love up to her expectations: none of her friends have been able to find their show because of how obscure the streaming service is. “We just did Rachael Ray!” Asher reassures her. (It’s good to have it confirmed that this is the Rachael in question. I had heard of Rachael Ray, but didn’t know anything about what she or her show looked like.) But she’s still unhappy, contrasting their situations with a friend of hers who got profiled in the New York Times for quitting art after failing to sell anything at a gallery opening. Somehow - I’m not sure how - this ends up leading to a discussion about the Holocaust and The Producers. I learn that Whitney is a convert to Judaism, while Asher is Jewish from birth; he assures her that she is just as Jewish as he is.

Anyway, he has a surprise for her, which he refers to as a “push gift”: a model house.

“What is it?” she asks.

“It’s Questa Lane,” he answers. “I’m giving it to Abshir as a gift to you.”

“A model of his house?”

“No, the real one. To live in. Forever.”

Abshir is, it seems, their tenant. They eventually will have to move out of the house they’re currently living in and back into the one he’s renting from them, thus kicking him out. But Asher has learned that what truly makes Whitney happy is making other people happy, so his gift to her is going to be Abshir’s expression of gratitude for this massive gift. “Can we afford this?” she asks.

“If we go broke, good,” he says. “Because we still have each other.”

She thanks him in hesitant Hebrew; he says “You’re welcome” more fluently.

Some time later, accompanied by very strange and discordant background music, they pull up outside Questa Lane. Abshir answers the door and is extremely nervous to see his landlords before him. “Are you planning to move me out? Should I have my cousin the lawyer here?”

They reassure him: No, this is good news!

Asher explains that they’re giving him the house, and throwing these special Pueblo clay bowls in with it.

Abshir’s immediate reaction: “Who pays for the property taxes for the rest of the year?”

This throws Asher and Whitney for a loop - they expected a more stunned or appreciative reaction - but they offer to do so3.

As they talk, some weird guy walks past behind Abshir. “Who is that?” Whitney asks.

“Uh…. a friend,” he answers, clearly hiding something. To change the subject he asks for the cash for the property taxes up front, claiming that paying the property taxes himself will help with his credit score. Asher is still trying to get Abshir to understand that he’s getting a massive gift, but the latter doesn’t say thank you even once; he just asks questions about the paperwork. When they finish, he asks, “That’s it?”, as though the conversation was a burden on him. He closes the door and they return to the car.

“That was really special,” says Whitney, massively in denial.

Asher had recorded the conversation for posterity. They watch the video and finally notice that Abshir didn’t seem very appreciative. “He was probably just putting on a strong face,” says Whitney. They pull away.

Back at home, a technician is installing air conditioning in the baby’s future room. Whitney asks him to hide the control panel so that it isn’t revealed that they’re not fully committed to this “passive home” schtick. “Are they bad for babies?” asks the technician. Asher gives an excuse: “It’s just for the first year,” because the summers have been crazy recently and they don’t want to gamble with the baby’s life.

Which reminds the technician: he has a gift for the boy. “We’re not accepting gifts until after the baby is born,” objects Whitney, rather harshly. “But wait - how did you know it’s a boy? We never told anyone.” The technician hems and haws and doesn’t really have a good explanation.

That night, as they’re lying in bed, Asher uses a flashlight to project some weird image on Whitney’s stomach. He chants in a language that the captions claim is Hebrew, but is very clearly not. As he does, Whitney stares off into the distance as the camera zooms in slowly on her face, and ominous background music plays.

The next morning, Whitney groggily wakes up and sees Asher lying on the ceiling above her. “Asher?” she asks. “Why are you up there?”

It takes him a few moments to realize where he is, but when he does, he freaks out. “What’s happening?!” He urges Whitney to run and open the door to the air-conditioned baby’s room, under the theory that air pressure buildup in their “passive house” is pushing him up there.

Which… what? How? If the air pressure in the house were so strong humans could float, they’d both be dead. And why would it be pushing him up but not her or anything else?

She opens the door but it fails to move him at all. New plan: open a window to release the air pressure so he can fall4. As she goes to do this, Asher exclaims, “This fucking house!” Interesting. So their whole environmentalist schtick was a scam? They don’t actually believe in how great “passive houses” are?

The window plan also fails. New plan: pull me down!

Eventually they eventually find themselves clinging to each other and hovering in midair - his gravity pulling him up and hers pulling her down. When they let go, she falls onto the bed and he falls back up towards the ceiling. That’s when Whitney starts to go wide-eyed with panic: “What is happening? What is this?”

Asher is still holding on to his “air pocket” theory, even though the fact that literally nothing else in the house is affected proves it’s nonsense. But he insists on it, and tells Whitney to open the front door too - but you need to go very carefully and slowly while holding on to things, and move away from anything that feels like hot air.

She does so, while he tries to crawl out of the room. Of course, it might be a really bad idea to go outside like this…

You know what he should do? Take off his shirt and see which way it falls.

She comes back in, crawling on the ground (as if that will help; if she gets hit by antigravity that just gives her farther to fall). “Don’t come in,” he warns, still believing in the air pocket theory - as if she wasn’t in the bedroom from the beginning and literally clinging to him a few minutes ago. He’s been trying to get a phone from the bedside table, but failing; the antigravity affecting him seems to be getting stronger over time. It’s not just gravity reversed. He’s having trouble standing.

And of course thanks to the panic she starts having contractions.

She brings a vacuum cleaner, which he uses to suction the phone and carefully lift it towards him. But he can’t grab it and it finally falls. She finally recommends that she just risk and get the phone. “You have to get out of this house,” she says, ignorant of the obvious fact: that if he does he’ll go flying into the stratosphere.

But she does grab the phone and crawl out of the house, pausing for a contraction. And even though Asher said to call the doctor first and then the doula, she calls the doula first. Meanwhile, Asher crawls and slowly makes it towards the front door, where he lies on the underside of the awning over the patio.

The doula, Moses, recommends over the phone that they take Whitney to a local hospital because things are progressing quickly. “I’ll drive you,” Asher says, in denial.

They wait. After a time, Asher speaks up: “We are not raising our baby in this house.” Which is, of course, an absurd assigning of blame considering he’s not in the house right now.

Moses arrives and takes the situation in stride. “I’ll pull you down,” he says and grabs on to Asher’s arms. But like an idiot he pulls him out from under the awning rather than straight down. And even though Moses is enormous, he can barely keep hold of him. Luckily he is able to get to beneath a tree before Asher slips out of his grasp and goes flying straight up, smack into a large bough.

Having done his worst, Moses turns to Whitney. “Everything you’re feeling is normal,” he says. “This is normal.”

Asher holds onto the tree branch in desperation, while Moses puts Whitney in the car and drives her to the hospital. As they leave, Whitney tells Asher to wait for the fire department, and Moses calls “Dougie” and tells him to come and help.

By the time Dougie arrives, Asher has collected some onlookers. He calls up to Asher, but the latter doesn’t exactly explain the situation well, and Dougie takes everything he says as a metaphor.

Meanwhile, at the hospital, the baby is breech; they leave the useless Moses behind and take Whitney to the OR to do a C-section.

The fire department arrives at the house and inflates a giant pillow below Asher, which means he still hasn’t explained what’s going on. Dougie latches on to one of the firemen and philosophizes about how “this happens to a lot of guys”.

A firefighter climbs the ladder and talks to Asher, who insists that the only way he’ll agree to let go is if they put a net over his back and anchor it to the fire truck. He’s still explaining himself badly, saying things like “I’ll go flying off” rather than being explicit with, “SOMETHING WEIRD IS HAPPENING AND GRAVITY IS PULLING ME IN THE WRONG DIRECTION.”

They probably wouldn’t believe him, but at least they won’t think he’s being metaphorical.

They toss a net haphazardly over his back. Not one that would hold on to anything (even if it weren’t gravity-reversed), just enough to reassure a crazy person that he has a net on his back. Asher wants it to be attached to the truck, but they’ve stopped listening to him. “Our supervisor will get you down,” one tells him. “She does it with bears all the time.”

“She’s done this with bears?” he asks.

“Tons of bears,” the firefighter answers. Even though it’s bleeding obvious that the firefighter isn’t talking about the same phenomenon, Asher seems somehow reassured by this. He seems fully prepared to believe that, yeah, this is just a regular part of their job, and space is littered with the corpses of bears that they didn’t get to in time.

The supervisor arrives, with a chainsaw. Asher begs her to stop, but she begins to cut down the branch. Dougie, using a drone to videotape it, actively mocks Asher and gleefully imagines the footage he’s going to get: “This is going to be awesome.”

She cuts the branch. The branch falls down. And Asher falls up, hurtling off into space.

In the hospital, the surgery is a success; the baby is taken out, happy and healthy and affected by gravity as normal. Whitney is thrilled, crying and laughing, unaware that her husband is dead.

And Dougie sits on the ground, sobbing at what he’s done and how selfish he’s been.

It’s all Moses’s fault, that moron, for pulling out and not down.

Lingering questions

• Why was Asher suddenly hit by antigravity? Has it ever happened to others? Will it happen again?

• Did the phenomenon hit everything in the area where Asher happened to be when he was asleep, or is it affecting Asher as a individual? In other words, if he were to spit or pee, would it fall up because its molecules have been antigravitized as he was, or fall down because it’s no longer part of him? Could he give people blood transfusions to make them lose weight?

• Having just lost both her homes, her husband, and presumably her TV show as a source of income, what will Whitney do? Will Dougie support her out of guilt? Will she sue the fire department?

• Who was the guy wandering around Abshir’s house and why were they acting so suspiciously?

• How did the air conditioning tech know they were having a boy?

• WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST WATCH?!

Ratings

I evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.

The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; a low rating may reflect low quality, but it may also reflect a deliberate choice. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.

Story: 6/10. This is one of those times when the raw number doesn’t entirely reflect what’s going on.

There were three major threads in this episode that were fully interwoven with one another: the Siegels’ on-and-off environmentalism, Whitney’s pregnancy, and (of course) the sudden bizarre shift halfway through into magical realism when Asher’s gravity is reversed. These three directly combined to cause Asher’s death.

Asher wastes a lot of time and effort - and certainly contributes to Whitney’s premature labor - in sending her to open various doors and windows, crawl around on the floor, and fetch the vacuum cleaner. A few moments’ critical thinking would establish that whatever has affected Asher has affected him personally and Whitney could walk around like a normal person. But the “passive house” concept loomed so large in his thinking that it isn’t until he is removed from it entirely that he is prepared to accept that maybe the house isn’t responsible (and even then he never says so explicitly). Even while he is under the awning, outside the front door, he still curses the house and declares that he’ll raise his child elsewhere.

It would never occur to me to blame my apartment if I one day found myself on the ceiling. And maybe Asher isn’t given to experimentation, but I would certainly try removing a sock, spitting, and messing around with the towel to see if my condition is contagious. You want to do tests like this long before you risk heading out under the open sky! The obsession with the house (which he is clearly not enamored with; I’ll go into that below) directly contributed to his death.

Then of course there’s the doula, Moses. “Call the doctor, then the doula,” Asher tells Whitney, abandoning his hippy-dippy persona when the chips are down. But she calls the doula only. Moses shows up, pulls Asher out rather than down, and disaster ensues. In fact, thanks to the C-section Moses doesn’t even stay with Whitney in the delivery room. His only contribution is to murder her husband and drive her to the hospital.

This sort of thorough interweaving - where each of the three plotlines affects and is affected by each of the others - is not only rare, it is exceptionally well done in this case. The only reason I’m not giving a much higher rating is that the plot threads themselves weren’t very complex. There was only one major incident in the episode: the moment that Asher wakes up on the ceiling. It’s a very high-concept plot, akin to the excellent Phone Booth: the episode does not depict a series of concrete events but rather puts the characters in a situation and sees how they respond.

You’ll notice that none of this analysis touches on the first half of the episode. This is because I have no context for any of it. Some of the setup is useful for establishing that the Siegels have (but don’t fully believe in) an environmental activist mindset, but the significance of the Abshir and Rachael Ray scenes went completely over my head. So it doesn’t affect the rating one way or the other.

Writing: 9/10. This is where the praise that I heaped above on the integration of three story threads really shows up in the rating. No need to go over all that again - it was fantastically good writing.

The episode is split into two halves: the first contains the cringe comedy for which Nathan Fielder is famous (and of which I am not a fan), while the second suddenly ends up in the genre of magical realism. It’s not an easy shift to make, and it was extremely well handled.

One thing I want to highlight is the way what happens to Asher foreshadows what happens during the birth. Asher wakes up to discover he is being pulled upside down by gravity, and when he tries to emerge from the house Moses pulls him out rather than down. Whitney discovers in the hospital that the baby is still breech, i.e., upside down, and ultimately the baby is born by C-section, i.e., being pulled out rather than down. I am choosing to believe these parallels were intended.

The only real criticism I have is in the conversations between Asher, Dougie, and the fire department. In order for him to go flying off into space at the end, Asher has to repeatedly fail to explain what is happening to him; fail to explicitly say “I am not speaking metaphorically”; and fail to notice that the people around him are treating his explanations as metaphor. You can get away with that for three or four sentences, but over the course of several minutes it became way too contrived. That could have been handled a bit better.

Production: 10/10. You don’t need to enjoy something to recognize when it is executed well. I hate cringe humor with a passion - but I can’t deny that Fielder is a master at it. The extremely long take of Asher and Whitney staring at the camera with awkward, fixed smiles and the bizarre scene with Abshir made me feel as perfectly uncomfortable as they were intended.

The episode also excelled at verisimilitude. It was easy to forget, in those long awkward moments, that these are actors. It played like reality TV and played it well.

And then there’s the wire work:

My god, the wire work! There were many, many moments where I gaped at the screen. At every point it looked exactly like Asher was being pulled upwards by normal (or extra-normal) gravity. How did they do that? Did they build some of the sets upside down, or rotating? Is Fielder an exceptionally good physical actor? How did I not notice any of his clothes or hair being pulled up by a wire? How much of it was CGI? How did they do that?

Characterization: 7/10. I feel like I got to know Asher and Whitney a great deal over the course of the episode, and to some extent even (though their appearances were brief) Dougie and Moses. These are three-dimensional characters with real depth to them.

I’m particularly curious as to how much Asher and Whitney buy into their TV environmentalist and New Age personas. They are both hypocritical for installing the air conditioner in the baby’s room. And Whitney’s secondary recommendation to Rachael Ray is hilarious: climbing all the way down from rebuilding your home to the banality of “take shorter showers”. She takes a few seconds to even think of it, too; it’s clear that they came up with the idea of the house as a gimmick for their reality TV show and it’s the only environmentalist idea they ever had.

And yet Whitney is slightly more believing in it than Asher is. It’s Asher, not Whitney, who keeps cursing the house for his antigravity - which is understandable, because it’s happening to him, but the explosion of “This fucking house!!” comes from deep-seated, long-term resentment. And the most interesting little nugget is that Moses, the doula, is Jewish and therefore probably someone Asher found rather than Whitney - yet in extremis he tells her to call the doctor first.

The biggest question I have is: how much of what happened to Asher is a physical manifestation of his anxieties over becoming a father? On the one hand, part of the point of the story is that all the other characters assume that is what he is going through. We’re meant to conclude that they’re assuming this wrongly; having that actually be the explanation would be too obvious. And certainly Asher protests the idea that he’s nervous, even insisting that he’ll drive Whitney to the hospital when he very clearly can’t get to the car.

But there are two hints that it might just be true.

First, in between bouts of blaming the house - which clearly isn’t the cause - how does Asher react to his antigravity? “STAY AWAY FROM ME!” he shouts at his wife, a little too vehemently. Even though in the above screenshot they were literally clinging to one another in midair, and nothing short of sex could possibly do more to “infect” her more than that, he repeatedly pushes his wife away. He goes back to blaming the house again, and even blames the weather, but never truly welcomes her back into his arms.

Second, there is his decision to give away the house to Abshir. Excessive generosity is a common warning sign of impending suicide, and Asher not only gives away a house to someone who doesn’t appreciate it in the least, he even throws in the property taxes and wastes money building a model of said house to give to his wife. Perhaps on some level he knew he wanted out.

I still feel that, on balance, we’re not meant to conclude that he metaphysically did this to himself. But the possibility is tantalizing.

Accessibility: 8/10. I’m not going to say that I was never confused - but I was rarely more confused than the creators intended me to be. Let’s leave it at that.

Closure: 6/10. Asher’s death certainly has some finality to it, but the mystery of the how and why - as well as what is in store for Whitney’s future - remain unsolved.

Do I want to watch the series now?

Perhaps surprising given the high scores this received in every category, but probably not.

I’m trying to picture what previous episodes of the show might have been about. Was the whole series in the magical realism genre? Surely not, because Asher and Whitney treat the event as unprecedented and bewildering as it deserved to be. If every episode had featured a talking potato or a chair that transforms anybody who sits in it into a llama for 38.2 minutes, they’d probably have taken Asher’s mild case of the antigravities a little more in stride.

Was the entire show a buildup of Nathan Fielder’s awkward humor, until this bizarre left turn halfway through the finale? That’s possible, but it means that longtime fans would have been thrown for a loop even more thoroughly than I was. Of course, it’s Nathan Fielder, so that’s probably the intention.

But if that’s the case I definitely don’t want to watch it, because I don’t enjoy that sort of thing. And it makes me wonder what the titular curse is. Surely not the antigravity, which didn’t show up until the last episode.

Maybe this was an anthology series? Every episode features Fielder and Stone playing a different couple who meet some unexpected doom? I could see that. In fact I’d probably be interested in watching that. You’ll have to let me know.

DarthStormwizard on Reddit

What do I know about this series going into it?

I’d vaguely heard its name before. Nothing beyond that.

Previously On

• A man kneels before a monkey in a cage and says “I guess this is goodbye”.

• Kelvin Gemstone wins some kind of trophy and gives the middle finger to the second-place contestant.

• Two men in weird turquoise capes want to hold a duel.

• Corey Milsap says his dad wouldn’t do anything to hurt Eli.

• Said Dad and Eli fight. I don’t know which is which, but one stabs the other and pushes the body into a river.

Recap

A man in a turquoise cape enters the halls of a Freemason-style secret society, filled with dozens of others wearing similar capes. “Gemstone!” he shouts. “I got business with you!” First conclusion: the “gemstone” of the show’s title is a surname; it’s probably not the title you get for joining this society.

One of the society members turns and mocks the shouter. “Because my gay brother whipped your ass?”

The shouter, Vance Simpkins, is pissed off - and as part of his revenge, he’s opened ten mini-mall churches right next to the other’s mini-mall churches. He challenges Jesse Gemstone to a duel: pistols to the death. Jesse is clearly frightened out of his wits, but covers it up with a blustering “I’m not scared of you!”

The lodge leader (or whatever) orders them to choose their seconds. Vance chooses one “Pastor Brad”, who does some complicated mystic hand gestures that he clearly made up on the spot while the others look at him like he’s insane. Jesse calls out for anyone willing to be his second, but there are no takers… until his father steps up and volunteers.

Which is a great way to instantly communicate not only that he has no allies in the lodge, but that he himself can’t think of anyone he can call upon.

At the duel, Jesse’s father - who I think is played by John Goodman - tries to get him to back out. But Jesse’s too embarrassed: look at all the trouble everyone in the lodge went to, with the drums and the bagpipes and everything. “You can quit [the society],” says Dad. But Jesse won’t do that either: “Cape & Pistol is the only thing that makes me special.”

The seconds take the loaded pistols, check them, and hand them to the duelists.

They take ten paces and turn, Vance shooting at Jesse instantly. But he misses. hitting a car off in the distance. Jesse takes his time with his shot and even starts to slowly approach Vance, which is surely against the rules. Vance, in a panic, dances back and forth to try to dodge the shot, and even begs for mercy as an orphan (something for which Jesse mocked him earlier).

But instead Jesse raises the gun and fires off into the distance. The bullet ricochets off a post and hits a bystander. Jesse apologizes profusely before making his intended dramatic announcement: “I don’t need this place to make me special! I quit!”.

Elsewhere, two flamboyantly gay men are dancing and celebrating in their newly built treehouse. One of them (who looks a lot like, but is not, Jimmy Carr) proposes marriage to the other (named Keefe), who accepts.

Elsewhere elsewhere, a man and woman are taking apart an exercise pole that the man “used to need” to prove his manliness. Their conversation is full of accidental innuendo. She calls him “Beej” and asks him if he’s crying over losing his monkey, Dr. Watson (which we saw in the Previously). But he denies that a man with a mustache ever cries.

Later, Jesse’s father, who I learn is the Eli mentioned in the Previously, has a conversation with his wife that I don’t understand at all. The only bit that I can glean is that he is worried about “Corey”, who is mourning his dead father - possibly the man who tried to kill Eli in the recap? Also I’m not entirely sure that this is Eli’s wife.

On a movie set somewhere, the actor playing Jesus is giving a speech during a break thanking everybody for their hard work and “denying” credit for his actions during something called the “Gator Park Massacre”. Even though I did much more than Eli, he says, I don’t deserve the credit. Clap for God. Not for me! For God. He basks in the clapping. And now it’s back to work on the set…

He looks up at the cross on which he is supposed to be crucified, and has flashbacks to kids and coleslaw. “You know what? Screw it. Everybody go home. I’m not sacrificing myself anymore.” He walks up as they stare, dumbfounded.

I wish I had any idea what that was about.

Meanwhile, Beej’s wife Judy drives him, blindfolded, to a surprise destination: Dr. Watson’s new owner.

Turns out Judy hates Dr. Watson and was the one who demanded he get rid of the monkey. But she knows how much her husband (named BJ Barnes) misses him, so she brought him to visit. Unfortunately, when they enter, Dr. Watson gives them the silent treatment. BJ makes his embarrassed excuses and starts to leave, but Judy is pissed off. She confronts Watson: You’re acting just like I do! You’re putting up a front, pushing everybody away, because you think you’ve been hurt. But you can’t act like a cunt to people who care about you! Don’t play games, go show BJ you miss him!

This gets through to the monkey, and he runs over and climbs onto BJ’s shoulders. Judy says sorry-not-sorry to the Watson’s new owner (a veteran who is using the monkey as a support animal): we’re taking him home with us and you’ll have to find another monkey.

Eli sits at a piano in an empty stage and holds an imaginary conversation with his three kids (the one who fought in the duel whose name I forget, Keefe’s fiancé, and Judy). In the most grotesquely explicit terms, they express support for his pursuit of an active sex life even after their mother’s death. He is deeply touched by this, even though he’s only reassuring himself. Then he asks: “Has anybody heard from Corey?”

Huh. That’s a weird thing to ask your imagination. So this isn’t all in his head, and they actually are here explicitly describing their own father… ahem. Well. Let’s move on.

Corey is depressed at his father’s death, they say, and maybe we should invite him up to the lake house to make him feel better. So now I’m getting a clearer picture of the relationships: Eli is widowed; the woman from earlier is his new love interest; and Corey is her son.

Up at the lake house, Corey stands in a gazebo staring at the lake, while indoors Lori (Eli’s love interest) and Judy sing a duet for the family’s enjoyment. After the duet, Corey shows up in a red jacket and does a weird dance, to rapturous applause.

Now, he looks a lot like Keefe’s fiancé - so much so that I thought this was Keefe’s fiancé, until I saw him in the audience and learn his name is Kelvin. Are the two played by the same actor? But the characters aren’t supposed to be related…

At the close of the dance, however, Corey suddenly demands from Eli $7 million dollars. The municipality is selling the Gator Park, you see, and he wants Eli to buy it for him. Lori tries to dissuade him: “You’re being very rude.” But Corey insists: Eli is extremely rich, and I killed my own father to save his life, so the least he can do is give me $7 million.

Corey’s wife, Jana, tries to smooth things over by clarifying that this would be a loan, but that’s clearly not what he has in mind. He orders her to shut up. “I’m sick of you speaking to me like that!” she objects. “I want a divorce.” And she leaves.

Well, that was awkward. Let’s go outside and play cornhole!

While they play, they assure Corey that they’ll help him any way they can (except for giving him an enormous pile of money, of course). Kelvin heads back into the house to clean chocolate off his shirt, but there he has a geisha-like vision of his mother, who leads him into Corey’s room. For no reason at all, he starts rifling through Corey’s bag, where he finds a gun.

Returning the gun to the bag, he then finds a golden Bible - which I remember being stolen in the Previously. He opens the inside front page, where its owners over the years have written their names; the last two names are those of Eli and Corey.

Just then Corey enters and asks Kelvin suspicious questions. Kelvin makes his excuses and flees with the Bible hidden1. He brings it outside to show the others, but Corey soon follows. “Corey, you stole this?” asks Jesse.

“My daddy stole it,” says Corey. “And I covered for him.” Over flashbacks, he describes the history of something called the “Ex-boyfriends’ club”, where he and his father would beat up - and eventually graduate to killing - anyone who dated his mother.

This explains why Corey’s father tried to murder Eli2. I also learn that Corey’s younger self looks nothing like him, and that “Gator Park” is a water park (rather than the nature reserve I had been assuming it was).

His story told, Corey wanders back into the house. The Gemstones stand around discussing this for a while and eventually conclude that Corey is about to kill himself. Sigh. They grudgingly decide they should stop him, or else the real estate value of the lake house will plummet.

Unfortunately, Corey had other plans: he ambushes them as soon as they enter the house, shooting (maybe killing?) Judy and winging Kelvin. Kelvin and Jesse flee into the house, with Corey in hot pursuit.

Kelvin sets up an ambush of his own and charges at Corey from behind - but stupidly does a dramatic “HUAAAAA!!!!” that gives Corey plenty of time to turn and shoot him dead.

Then Corey figures out which closet Jesse is hiding in and shoots him through the door; Jesse collapses, wounded but not dead.

But Corey is out of bullets to finish him off, so he heads outside to his car to get more.

Meanwhile, the wounded Jesse drags himself across the floor, leaving a smearing blood trail behind him. He soon encounters Kelvin - not dead, and doing exactly the same thing. They are soon joined by a blood-trail-leaving Judy as well, and in tandem they push themselves down the hall towards the base of a stairwell. But Jesse’s gun is upstairs, in his “everyday carry bag”, and there’s no way any of them can make it up there…

Judy has an idea: she reach up and grabs a tiny serving bell from a side table, which summons Dr. Watson. “Go and get Jesse’s purse!” she tells him.

“It’s an everyday carry bag!” insists Jesse.

Dr. Watson brings the bag, from which Jesse retrieves the gun. And just as Corey bursts back in the front door with a semiautomatic rifle, Jesse shoots him dead.

“I think you just grazed me,” Corey insists, and collapses with copious amounts of blood leaking out the side of his head. He apologizes for forcing them to kill him. They want to call a doctor, but Corey asks them to give him the last rites instead.

So the three of them gather around him and give a moving prayer about doubt, fear, jealousy, letting go, and following the Lord’s path. They ask God to guide Corey to his Kingdom, even if he doesn’t deserve it, because “Maybe he’ll make a better angel than he was a man”.

In the denouement, Eli officiates at the wedding between Kelvin and Keefe, where instead of “traditional vows” they spit into their hands and do a secret handshake, followed by putting glowing scifi rings on each other’s fingers.

During the dancing, Eli is congratulated for finally having married off all of his kids. “You’re now free,” says the guy who fought the duel against Jesse in the opening scenes (and whose name I can’t remember). He offers Eli condolences for having broken up with Lori, but it makes sense: things just got too complicated, what with her ex-husband trying to rape3 and kill them, and his children killing her son. Eli’s friends tell him to go get some happiness.

Lori narrates over the closing montage, in which we see (inter alia) her crying at Corey’s grave and the Gemstones putting the golden Bible back on display. She describes Jesus’s love and says she’ll always be waiting to share her own, which implies that it was Eli who broke up with her. Except no - I’m wrong. The voiceover is Eli reading a letter that “Aimee-Leigh” sent, which Lori gave him earlier in the episode. I have no idea who Aimee-Leigh is and am now just confused.

Some time later, “somewhere in Florida”, Eli is getting ready to set off on his boat, when suddenly Lori is standing there on the dock. “You could use a first mate,” she says, and joins him.

Lingering questions

None, actually. This is rare but the episode wrapped up very nicely.

Ratings

I evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.

The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; a low rating may reflect low quality, but it may also reflect a deliberate choice. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.

Story: 3/10. There was only one major plotline, that of Corey’s revenge, and even this was not very complex. There weren’t any real twists and turns, and only the barest story to tell: Corey demands money, they turn him down, he tries to kill them. The main plot briefly contacted some of the subplots (Judy’s relationship with Dr. Watson; Eli’s relationship with Lori) but didn’t really intertwine with them.

The episode featured a good number of subplots, but these were for the most part handled as a checklist: we need to resolve Jesse’s feud with Vance, check; we need to bring Keefe and Kelvin together permanently, check; Eli needs to get together with Lori, check. They were concluded but not really brought to a conclusion.

Writing: 9/10. The writers have a genuine talent for writing extended conversations that serve the purpose of the scene while doubling as genuinely clever (i.e., not cheap) metaphor or innuendo. The conversation between BJ and Judy as they take apart the stripperexercise pole, for example: every single line had a double meaning, and yet it simultaneously felt completely natural. The general thrust of the conversation was preserved even as it extended more and more, until finally it was twice as long as it needed to be - yet it never got tired. The writers really pulled that one off.

The “I’m sick of being Jesus” metaphor was similarly well done, but don’t ask me to duplicate the above effort…

The episode was also ridiculously funny. I burst out laughing for the first time when Pastor Brad did his ridiculous hand gestures, then again during the duel itself, and several more times across the episode through to when the three Gemstones were dragging themselves across the house leaving blood smears behind them. Absolutely brilliantly done.

And I’m really glad they subverted the “unique vows” cliche. I had even groaned out loud when Eli mentioned the prospect. Writers often can’t resist the temptation to write either dramatic or comedic vows for the characters to read out, to show off how clever they are, and they are always tedious4.

Production: 10/10. Excellent acting and comedic timing by everyone involved, actors and directors and editors and Foley artists alike. Every joke was perfectly delivered; I’ll highlight the car alarm, the ricocheting bullet that hit the bystander, and Judy’s exasperated groan as she came around the corner to announce herself.

The actors did an excellent job giving depth to their characters. The sets and costuming were perfect. I loved the use of diegetic music during Corey’s rampage. I really don’t have a bad word to say about this.

Characterization: 7/10. The script and the acting combined to give me some good insights into who these characters are. Even beyond the comedic lines (“the resale value of the house”) that showed how the Gemstone children fail to be considerate of others, there were more subtle ones, like saying in front of Corey that they finally managed to make Corey smile.

Then there are the subtle character traits. The episode opens with an accusation against Jesse that he isn’t brave because he sent Kelvin to fight Vance in his place; it reinforces this with Jesse outright admitting that he’s only going through with the duel to save on social embarrassment and is frightened out of his wits. And then at the end, which of the two siblings sets up an ambush to try and stop Corey, and which one hides meekly in a closet? That was a very nice touch.

I do have a problem with Jesse randomly deciding to quit Cape & Pistol. Given he had literally seconds earlier declared how much he needs it, it was very sudden and felt unearned. But in fairness it’s possible that previous episodes legitimately built that up, and it’s only to me that that decision appears baseless.

Accessibility: 8/10. A few moments of confusion, especially with how similar Corey and Kelvin look to one another, but for the most part the episode was easy to understand without context. Characters used each other’s names early and often, almost as if to deliberately bring me into the loop. I still don’t know who Aimee-Leigh is.

Closure: 9/10. Almost every single plot and subplot that was brought up in this episode seemed to be tied off with a nice little bow. The only exception is the subplot with the Jesus actor (who may or may not have been Vance?) - but I didn’t understand that much at all, so it mattered little.

Do I want to watch the series now?

Oh God. I wish I could. It’s hilarious and brilliant and wonderful.

My only concern is the gratuitous sexual content, of which I’ve never been a fan. In this case that content is verbal, not visual - but the scene where the three Gemstone siblings talk about their father’s sexual urges in graphic detail really bothered me. Some people find that sort of thing funny, but I’m more of a prude. I can appreciate sexual content in service of a joke, but not when the content itself is the joke.

If that sort of thing doesn’t bother you, then I highly recommend the episode and by extension the show. For me, though, before I commit to watching the series I’d want to know whether that scene was a one-off or whether it permeates the series as a whole.

Keybounce on Discord

What do I know about this series going into it?

It involves people trapped in a secret wilderness area that still has dinosaurs in it. It’s been remade a couple of times, but Keybounce specifically requested the original 1974 version.

While clicking through, I glimpsed the phrase “forest ranger Rick and his two children”.

Recap

The opening credits tell the story of “Will and Holly Marshall”, whose father fell into a time portal after an earthquake. They went into the time portal to search for him, and were followed by their uncle Jack. They encounter stop-motion dinosaurs and monsters and green screens of various types.

It’s a perfectly standard opening credits song (remember when we used to have those?), but what confuses me is the jaunty banjo music that accompanies it. It feels almost like a deliberate parody of a 70s sitcom theme. Is this a comedy?

We open on Holly, who is cooking vegetable soup, accompanied by a sort of talking ape-kid named Cha-Ka. (I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that this show thinks primitive men lived in the Mesozoic era.) But while they go get the vegetables to put in the soup, someone steals their pot of boiling water.

Uncle Jack decides the theft is bizarre and pointless enough that it must mean something; he assigns Will to keep watch and heads outside to investigate. There he is ambushed by an American Indian1, but easily turns the tables on him. Upon interrogation, the American Indian reveals that he had been bringing “white man medicine” back to his tribe, the Nez Perce, who are suffering from some sort of plague. His horse panicked and ran off with the medicine, and so he stole their boiling water to make “Indian medicine” instead.

Jack brings Lone Wolf back to their home, where he tells the family the rest of the story: he’s from 1877, and was educated by chief Joseph is the leader. Will gasps with excitement: “You know Chief Joseph?!2”

Before he can answer, Cha-Ka rushes in, freaked out. “I saw a terrible creature that made a terrible noise!” The noise he imitates is clearly that of a horse - so Will goes out to fetch it for Lone Wolf. But he finds it tied to a tree by human hands, which turns out to be a trap set by one “Captain Elmo Diggs of the US Cavalry” to trap the “no-good thievin’ Indian” who stole government property. At gunpoint he forces Will to bring him back to the cave.

But then Diggs collapses, giving Will an opportunity to grab the gun and discover that it’s empty. Diggs explains: He, and the other soldiers in his fort, are all sick with the same plague that is affecting the Nez Perce. He had followed Lone Wolf into a “roaring twister”, and they both ended up in this strange place.

Okay, so this isn’t a case where the writers think primitive men lived in the Mesozoic. The Marshalls, Lone Wolf, Diggs, and presumably Cha-Ka all got sent through time to end up here.

Just as they’re about to head back, Will and Diggs are approached threateningly by a dimetrodon. But they easily defeat it by walking away from it.

When they reach the cave, Diggs wants to go at Lone Wolf’s throat even though he’s half dead from the fever. “He stole the medicine from the fort!” The others hold him back, while Lone Wolf insists the medicine belonged to him. For some reason, Uncle Jack wastes energy mediating the debate between them instead of pointing out that “You’re trapped in prehistoric times and the medicine can’t help anyone anyway.”

Meanwhile, outside, Cha-Ka is attacked by a two-headed beast while fetching water. He runs away from it. I’m not going to knock the show for its 70s-era special effects, but shouldn’t they put effort into making the encounters narratively perilous?

Jack implores Lone Wolf to use his “Indian medicine” to save Diggs, which is confusing; can’t they use the “white man’s medicine” that Lone Wolf had said was on the horse? Ah: Lone Wolf demands Diggs’s horse in return for saving his life, so Lone Wolf’s horse (the one with the medicine) is still out there somewhere. But he wants the horse in advance, so he can ride it when he gathers the plants and things he needs for the medicine.

They let him go, but Will wonders if he’ll even return. And Diggs laments that the horse is the only way “either of us will get back”. Get back where? Have they not told him yet that he’s gone backwards in time? Does he think he was merely transported an immense distance and need only ride his horse back home? Or does he think the horse can time travel?

They wait, and eventually Jack decides to go out and track Lone Wolf down. He finds him, hiding behind a rock from a Tyrannosaurus. So Jack pulls a trick he’s apparently pulled before: leaning a rock on the trunk of a flexible tree and catapulting it into the distance, upon which the Tyrannosaurus wanders off in search of the distraction.

“Where are the supplies you were collecting?” he asks Lone Wolf, suspiciously.

“The animal attacked before I was able to get them,” Lone Wolf replies. Jack knows he’s lying, and so to keep an eye on him says they’ll find the supplies faster if they go together.

Later, Lone Wolf waves a feather over the dying Diggs; hangs some sort of effigy above him, paints random stuff on his face, throws flash powder into a fire, and then feeds him medicine. Overnight he bangs on a drum beside the fire - and we see three moons in the sky! So the time portals have actually taken them to some other planet?

And finally Diggs wakes up, feeling much better, to his disbelief.

The next morning, however, the others are awoken to the sound of Diggs putting shackles on Lone Wolf. “These are my orders, to bring him back for trial. It’s my obligation!”

Jack: “But you owe an even bigger obligation to Lone Wolf.”

Diggs: “Okay.” Well, that was easy.

He releases Lone Wolf, whom Jack pulls aside: “When you left to collect the ingredients, were you intending to come back?” “What do you think?” asks Lone Wolf. Jack just nods.

Lone Wolf prepares to ride off. “Without that horse, I’ll never get back to the fort,” laments Diggs. But Lone Wolf invites him to ride the horse with him.

In the denouement, Holly explains something that’s been bugging her (and me): “I finally figured out why Lone Wolf stole the boiling water,” says Holly. “He couldn’t build his own fire because Diggs was following him.”

Finally, Will sings a song to round out the last thirty seconds of the episode.

Lingering questions

• With three moons, I assume the Land of the Lost is on some other planet. How are Diggs and Lone Wolf going to get home? Are there known portals to which the Marshalls directed them? Why doesn’t the Marshall family go home, then? Is it just because they’re looking for the missing father? Do they regularly return to Earth to resupply?

• Given the number of times Lone Wolf and Diggs tried to betray one another, will it happen again the moment they’re not under the watchful eye of the Marshalls (pun intended)?

• Lone Wolf never ended up finding his horse, which had the “white man medicine”. Even if he makes it back to his tribe, how many of them will survive?

• If Lone Wolf and Diggs do return home, has their rescue by the Marshalls changed history, or is their encounter part of a stable time loop?

Ratings

I evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.

The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; a low rating may reflect low quality, but it may also reflect a deliberate choice. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.

Story: 3/10. The episode had a weird, stuttering kind of pacing. On the one hand, several parts of the episode seemed rushed: the Dimetrodon encounter was resolved by simply walking away from it, and it took all of three seconds to persuade Diggs to let Lone Wolf go. But on the other hand, they found the time to include a completely irrelevant scene of Cha-Ka encountering (and, again, walking away from) a two-headed monster, plus a random song at the end.

I suspect that the show had a dinosaur quota it needed to fill in each episode, so after the writers included one plot-relevant encounter (the Tyrannosaurus) and one barely plot-relevant encounter (the Dimetrodon, to show Diggs’s reacting to these new surroundings), they exhausted their creativity and stuck the two-headed monster in just to give the episode a boost.

As for the actual story - it’s very simple and mostly predictable, with no subplots to speak of.

Writing: 5/10. The writing was fine for its day. I’ll give the writers credit for remembering the theft of the water that launched the episode. I had been certain, by the end, that the nonsensical nature of the theft had been forgotten - but they actually came up with a good, in-character, plot-relevant explanation for it!

Production: 6/10. Obviously I’m grading on a curve here, but the special effects were probably very impressive for the 70s. The makeup job on Cha-Ka was excellent (though I wonder if it would have held up if the image quality were better). The music wasn’t bad.

The acting was fine, with Cha-Ka as a notable exception. Diggs did a good enough job looking woozy that I started wondering why the actor was making that strange choice - only to be pleasantly surprised when he collapsed and it turned out to be part of the plot. Lone Wolf hewed closely to the 70s-era stereotype to which he was supposed to be hewing.

Characterization: 5/10. You’re not going to get a lot of characterization in the 70s, but even taking that into account all of the main characters were uninteresting. But the guest stars steal the show from them. Depending on the era, most shows would have the Cowboy be pure good and the Indian be pure evil, or vice versa; I very much liked the way both of them turned out to be unreliable backstabbers with hearts of gold. Though, as I asked above, I wonder how long it’ll stick without the Marshalls keeping an eye on them.

Accessibility: 8/10. I have a lot of questions about how the time portals work, and where exactly Diggs and Lone Wolf thought they were going at the end. But the opening credits were kind enough to explain (most of) the premise, and I was not confused at any point.

Closure: 3/10. This is just another episode of the series. There is no sign that it was intended to close out the show in any way.

Do I want to watch the series now?

No. It probably has a nostalgic charm for those who grew up watching it, but it’s just too silly.

DarthStormwizard on Reddit

What do I know about this series going into it?

Saul Goodman is (I think) some kind of crooked lawyer who appeared on Breaking Bad. I’ve previously done the finale of that show for this Substack, but I’m pretty sure Saul didn’t appear in that episode. There’s also either a character or an actor named Mike Ehrmentrout. Beyond that I know nothing.

Recap

A cliff in the middle of the desert. A car, on its roof, at the bottom of the cliff. A man wearing a white bandana, carrying two duffel bags, stumbles up a hill, suffering from heat stroke - until he finds a pool of water being pumped by a windmill. Gratefully he rushes up and dunks his face in the water repeatedly, then starts desperately drinking from it.

“Slow down,” says an arriving man in a hat, played by Jonathan Banks, carrying two more duffel bags. “You’re gonna make yourself sick.”

The two of them sit to rest. Bandanna tells Hat: We’ve got $7 million in these duffel bags. Let’s split it between us and run.

Hat: “It’s not ours, and I know people who might have a problem with us taking it.”

But Bandanna’s got a plan: We’d use $6 million of it to build a time machine, and they’ll never find us! It’s unclear if he’s suffering from heat stroke, making a joke, or is completely serious (and a total moron).

He asks Hat: “When would you go back to?”

Hat: December 8, 2001. No, March 17, 1984. The latter is the day he took his first bribe; he does not explain the former.

Bandanna: May 10, 1965, when Warren Buffett took over at Berkshire Hathaway. He’d invest his half of the remaining million in Berkshire, then come back to the present and be a billionaire.

Hat is surprised: Just money? Is there nothing you’d want to change? Bandanna doesn’t answer, just gets up and starts walking again.

After the opening credits, we open on a black-and-white flashback scene: Walter White runs to his car and drives away in a panic, while a woman watching from a window reports his license plate number to the police. White gets to his (current?) home and collects various things while listening in on the police radio. He hears them accurately report his car’s make, his current location, and his own description. Looking out the front window, he sees officers arrive, so he flees out the back - starting to run when he hears a helicopter overhead.

As he runs, I get a better look at his face, and I’m not sure it is Walter White. But I’m not sure it isn’t either.

He flees down one alleyway after another, carrying a small box under his arm, before hiding in a dumpster in desperation. Inside, he opens up the box and pulls out a business card for a vacuum cleaner salesman. He memorizes to himself the phrase “Hoover Max Extract Pressure-Pro Model 60”, then pulls out something small - diamonds? - that he accidentally scatters into the trash. As he desperately collects them, he hears a banging noise on the top of the dumpster: the police have found him, and he’s surrounded and under arrest.

At the station, he overhears a bunch of cops crowded around a computer in the other room, listening to an ad for the titular Saul Goodman’s law firm. And then he is presented with a phone. Is he going to call Saul, as the ad recommended? No: he calls his coworker “Krista” and gives her some banal instructions on what to do in the office today. I learn his name is Gene, so this isn’t Walter White after all.

This entire scene is still in black and white, which I don’t understand. Is this all an extended flashback?

Thrown in his cell, Gene stares at something a previous inmate scribbled on the wall about a lawyer, then starts demanding that he get another phone call1. I guess he’s calling Saul after all.

Meanwhile, in a parking lot somewhere, a man answers his cell phone: “Bill Oakley of William Oakley and Associates”. The caller is the titular Saul - which Oakley freaks out about, as he’ll have to report this conversation to the police. “That’s okay,” says Saul. “I’m in the police station.”

So Gene is Saul?

He’s calling to hire Oakley to be his lawyer, and asking him to fly to Nebraska to do… something I’m not clear about. Oakley is honest with him: there’s an enormous amount of evidence against you, so no matter who your lawyer is you’re screwed. But Saul is eternally optimistic.

Still in black and white, we see Bandanna (the guy from the opening) being taken in chains to a plea negotiation with an array of prosecutors. He’s being charged with 27 RICO counts, including distributing a controlled substance, money laundering, complicity in two murders, and so on. The deal on the table: thirty years in prison, where he might (if convicted of all the other charges) be sentenced to life plus 190 years23.

But he’s barely listening to the offer, because he knows somebody-or-other’s widow is standing behind the two-way mirror. He invites her in.

“They found you in a garbage dumpster,” she tells him. So Bandana is Gene is Saul Goodman? What the heck is going on? And why is this all still in black and white?

The widow continues, describing her fury at how Bandana/Gene/Saul helped the person who murdered “Hank and Steve”4, who were shot dead and left in a hole in the desert. And for what? Money.

Gene/Saul puts on a transparently performative show of remorse, but then twists it around: “I, like you and Hank and Steve, are all victims. Two years ago, a man named Mayhew came to my office and told me they wanted one of my clients to lie. When I refused, they took me to the middle of the desert and pointed a gun at him before an open grave. So yes, I made money, but I knew Walter White would kill me if I didn’t work for him.”

He describes the events of October 4, 20095, where people working for Walter White murdered ten men inside three prisons in the space of two minutes. He lists a few other incidents and says that Walter White might be dead, but he’s still scared of Jesse Pinkman and the others that Walter was working with.

Throughout the speech he addresses the widow, Mrs. Schrader, exclusively - not the prosecutors that he actually has to convince. But one of them speaks up: “You think jurors are gonna buy that?” Gene/Saul drops the act (because they all know it’s an act) and says: I just need one juror to buy it. And you, Mr. Prosecutor, have a perfect trial record, which is very impressive, and it would be a shame if anything happened to it…6

Schrader turns to the prosecutor in fear and anger. “You’re not going to negotiate with this man,” she demands. Smash cut to a hallway outside, with Schrader storming off, her face a mask of fury and resentment.

Some time later, surrounded by empty takeout containers, the agreement is read out: a prison sentence of 85 to 90 months.

Saul (I’ll settle on this as his name) asks to be imprisoned in FCI Butner Low, Wing D, which has a golf program; they give it to him. Then he adds another demand: a pint of Blue Bell Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream every Friday, in return for which he offers information about a previously unknown homicide: someone named Howard Hamlin, who the government thinks killed himself.

But they laugh at him. Saul’s ex, Kim Wexler, already confessed. So he’s not getting his ice cream (or, more likely, an additional reduction in sentence).

We’re back in color, with Saul just waking up to some noise. The other man in the room with him is Walter White (for real this time), and Walter is irritably trying to fix the water boiler. “There’s no point in staying down here,” he says “if we don’t have hot water.” Are they in some kind of bunker?

Apropos of nothing, Saul suddenly asks Walter: “What would you do if I had a time machine?” He wants Walter’s input “as a scientist”. Walter scoffs and says that, scientifically, time travel is impossible.

“It’s just a thought experiment,” says Saul. “There’s gotta be something you’d go back and change if you could.” Which is odd, because in his conversation with Hat it sounded like Saul was very much not inclined towards this sort of introspection.

“You’re talking about regrets,” says Walter. “If you want to ask about regrets, ask about regrets, and leave time travelling nonsense out of it.”

Now, two things are immediately unclear:

• First, Walter is wrong. A time machine is far more general than regrets; you might want to go back to 1747, for instance, or 1483, or 3761 BCE.

• Second, I’m very confused about the timeline here. Black-and-white (or sepia) color schemes are usually code for “this is a flashback” - but Saul said during the plea negotiation that Walter was dead. So this scene in color must be earlier. Then which scenes take place in the present? Only the trip through the desert?

Walter’s regret is his stepping away from a company he founded as a graduate student with some of his friends. He now realizes his friends had manipulated him into it, and the company is now successful. If only he had stayed…

Saul, as a lawyer, is excited. “Why did you never mention this to me? I could’ve done something with this! Wrongful termination! Patent fraud!”

Walter puts him down harshly. “You’re the last lawyer I’d have gone to.” Which Saul accepts. “What about your regrets?” Walter asks.

Saul once pretended to slip and fall outside a store, so he could sue them, but had thrown himself to the ground so hard he actually busted his knee - permanently. Watler mocks him for being pathetic: “So you were always like this?”

From there we fade to another scene in black and white: Saul on a plane, escorted by a US Marshall. When his lawyer passes by, Saul grabs him to ask about his ex.

The lawyer says there are no witnesses or physical evidence, so she won’t go to jail. But she had also confessed directly to the widow of the murdered man, who is bringing a civil suit against her.

Elsewhere, four women are sitting talking about nothing in particular. One of them seems kind of spaced out, and when we see her in her office later she’s still staring at nothing. She leaves work early and heads to a legal office to sign up as a volunteer.

Her name is Kim, and later that night she gets a call (on her cell phone) from a “Suzanne Ericsen”, who gives her the news about her ex, Saul: he was arrested in Nebraska two days ago and is being extradited to New Mexico. And is giving testimony that affects her personally…

Time skip to Saul in court. Kim is in the audience, as is Hank’s widow. The judge comments that “the defendant has requested the name of Saul Goodman”, so I assume his real name was Gene. The prosecutors are a battery of federal agents: AUSA, FBI, DEA, led by George Castellano. Saul is representing himself; Oakley is serving as advisory counsel.

The judge goes over the plea bargain and expresses serious displeasure. A seven-year sentence for this parade of horribles? Oakley writes a reassuring note to Saul: “Don’t worry, this judge always follows government sentencing recommendations.” But Goodman interrupts anyway. Even the judge recommends he stay quiet, but he persists. He starts to tell the Mayhew story.

I know what’s going to happen: he’ll contradict himself on some major point in the story, and the prosecutors will jump on it and withdraw the plea.

Ah, scrap that prediction. He retells the same story, word for word, too perfectly. So Prediction Two: the prosecutors will bring both statements before the jury, using his well-rehearsed words to prove it’s fake.

…nope. I’m wrong on both counts. Halfway through, he suddenly swerves into new territory. “I saw opportunity. For the next 16 months I built Walter White’s drug empire.”

The judge tries to stop him: You’re undermining the factual basis of the plea agreement, and you’re going to void it! But Saul doesn’t care.

Oakley requests to be removed from the case, so that Saul doesn’t take his reputation down with him; “Not a chance,” says the judge.

Saul continues: “I lied to the government about Kim Wexler,” his ex-wife. That’s what this is about: he’s throwing himself under the bus to save her. “I laundered his money, I lied for him, I conspired with him and made millions. Walter White would’ve been dead or behind bars within a month, and Agent Schrader and Agent Gomez would still be alive, if not for me.”

Oakley tries desperately to bail water out of the sinking ship by raising whatever objections he can think of, but Saul keeps going: “I got my brother’s malpractice insurance cancelled so he couldn’t practice law anymore, after which he killed himself. My name is James McGill.”

Finally he sits down, and Oakley turns to him in astonishment.

The prosecutors immediately withdraw the plea agreement and urge the court to impose the maximum sentencing.

We return to a scene in color, with Jimmy7 tripping over something in the dark. As I get my bearings and the light comes up, I can see that Jimmy is James/Saul/Gene/Bandana8. He’s delivering food and supplies to an older man - his father, perhaps? - who is played by Michael McKean. “I could hire somebody to do this,” Michael says. “You’re trying to start your practice.”

“You’re my brother,” says James. “You’d do the same for me.”

Michael - character name Charles McGill, aka Chuck - wonders if James stole the ice he’s bringing from a motel ice machine; James noticeably avoids the question. He tries to engage James in conversation, but the latter isn’t much interested in a heart-to-heart. He leaves and says he’ll be back with another delivery tomorrow.

And back to black and white. So at this point it’s abundantly clear that the black and white scenes are the present, while the color scenes are flashbacks. Which is a very strange approach - but I have to admit that it somehow works better given the content of the scenes.

Saul/Jimmy is on a prisoner transport, being taken to ADX Montrose - the one prison he had said during the plea bargain that he didn’t want to end up in. One of the other prisoners recognizes him: “Better call Saul, right?”

“I’m McGill,” he objects.

The prisoner doesn’t buy it9 and spreads the word, and soon everyone on the bus is chanting: “Better! Call! Saul!” They really like him. So Montrose isn’t going to be as bad as he thought…

Some time later, Saul is working in the prison kitchen when he’s notified of his lawyer’s arrival. But it turns out to be Kim, who used her New Mexico bar card to get in. “You could’ve gone to prison for just 7 years,” she says, “But now it’s 86.10”

As she leaves, they stare at one another through the barbed wire fence.

Lingering questions

• Why are all the present-day scenes in black and white?

• What happened to Hat on December 8, 2001, that he wants to undo?

• Why did Saul need to memorize “Hoover Max Extract Pressure-Pro Model 60”?

• What was Kim doing in Florida? Why did she suddenly quit her job to volunteer at a legal aid office?

Ratings

I evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.

The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; a low rating may reflect low quality, but it may also reflect a deliberate choice. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.

Story: 3/10. Only a single plot thread. It had some good twists and turns, but there weren’t any subplots to speak of. The closest thing to a subplot was Kim suddenly leaving her job to volunteer at a legal aid office, which went nowhere because she immediately got a phone call and flew to New Mexico. The second-closest thing to a subplot was Saul’s elaborate plan to take Oakley down with him; I assume there’s some history there I don’t know about.

That very history, however, contributes to the most unbelievable part of the plot: Saul’s nigh-magical ability to spin other people around on his little finger. Because Saul could have given Oakley plenty of warning that he was about to tank his own case11. The fact that he didn’t proves that he hates Oakley and wants to sabotage him.

In which case, what was Oakley thinking signing on to represent him? Saul spins this as a good career opportunity for Oakley - but Oakley isn’t even representing him but rather serving as advisory counsel while Saul represents himself. Was Oakley somehow completely unaware of Saul’s animus towards him? Had he never heard the “fool for a client” saying? If a man who hates you calls you up and says “I’ll be representing myself, but I want you to tie yourself to my ship and sink or float based on my own success”, only a complete moron would say yes.

But perhaps Saul just lives in a world with complete morons. After all, he plays the same trick on the US attorney, who walks into the room with enough evidence to blot out the sun and, within minutes, is convinced that he’ll lose the case. Yet Saul never even claims that he’ll be acquitted; the best argument that Saul puts forward is that he’ll cause a hung jury. The AUSA not only buys it, but somehow believes that the lack of a verdict when he could easily retry Saul would spoil his “flawless record” as a prosecutor12. What?!

I’ve seen and enjoyed the presence of many flawless-manipulator characters. But they have to actually be good at manipulation; Saul relies too heavily on the other side not being able to put one and one together.

There’s also a major plot hole. Saul gives up his freedom so as to save his ex-wife from losing all of her money in a civil suit - but his confession doesn’t invalidate hers. He only says that he lied to the government about her; how does that prove that she lied to the government about herself? She should be no less exposed to the suit as she was before.

Writing: 7/10. The writing was compelling and generally of much higher quality than most television shows. I very much liked the use of flashbacks to show us the history of Saul’s time travel question. And bringing it back around to say that Saul does have one regret - causing his brother’s death - was effective.

There were two flaws of the same type, in which the writers decided on the setting for a conversation before deciding on its content. Saul would have had a dozen opportunities to speak to Oakley between the plea bargain and the flight, and it’s not clear what benefit there was to setting it on the plane that outweighed that inconsistency. Kim would have had a dozen opportunities to speak to Saul between the plea bargain and the sentencing hearing (not to mention between sentencing and the actual transfer to the prison) but the writers decided the scene would be more dramatic in the prison.

Production: 7/10. Great acting from Saul, from Mrs. Schrader, and from Judge Small. The use of black and white for the present-day scenes and color for the flashbacks was really weird, especially since the vast majority of the episode ended up in black and white, but thanks to the content (almost entirely courtroom scenes) it actually worked.

Characterization: 6/10. Saul carries this category almost entirely on his own; nobody else (even Walter White in his cameo appearance) showed much depth. But Saul is a fascinating character. Pathetic and contemptible in so many ways, looked down on by Hat and by Walter White and by nearly everybody else he encounters - yet so thoroughly self-assured that he’ll act with overt smugness before the plea agreement is even signed. Yet the smugness is in many ways an act, given the way he storms around his prison cell berating himself for being caught - and, as stated above, his manipulation skills aren’t what he thinks they are, being too reliant on having the right opponent.

One more note. At the plea agreement, he offers information on Hamlin’s murder, throwing his ex-wife under the bus for his own benefit. But then he gives himself up for her. That’s very curious. With a lesser script - or perhaps a lesser actor - I’d criticize that as sloppiness; that the writers didn’t notice the contradiction. But somehow (and I’m genuinely not sure why, but it’s a testament to the actor) I instinctively feel there’s a consistent throughline here.

Accessibility: 5/10. The plot of the episode was easy to understand, and (aside from some brief confusion between Kim and Mrs. Schrader) the characters were quickly identifiable. But I spent most of the episode unsure as to whether I was watching the past or the present, and the reversal of the “black and white is flashback” convention, while perhaps justified, made things more difficult.

Closure: 10/10. It’s very easy to wrap things up when you have only one plotline. Saul has spent the entire series (presumably) supporting people who commit evil acts and committing evil acts himself - and now he’ll be in prison for the rest of his natural life. You don’t get much more closure than that.

Do I want to watch the series now?

It’s not for me; I feel like it would be too frustrating. As it is, I have trouble watching shows about awful people getting away with doing awful things. Watching somebody who isn’t even good enough to get away with it, yet does so anyway, will probably be even worse.

jakkdl on our Discord server and TheKiller_07 on Reddit

What do I know about this series going into it?

I read some of the Sandman comics about 25 years ago. I remember only two facts, either or both of which may be incorrect:

• The main character, Dream, was imprisoned (or something) at the start of the 20th century, causing the real-life epidemic of sleeping sickness, and was freed at the start of the comic.

• His sister is Death.

Recap

“Dear Sylvia,” narrates a man typing at his desk. It’s a suicide note; he’s despondent about the damage that humanity will do to the planet, that democracy is dying, and (repeating himself) that the human race is dying too but will do as much damage to the planet as it can before that happens1.

He is interrupted by the noise of somebody entering the house, and quickly hides the pills with which he was planning on killing himself. It’s a woman who is “playing truant” by taking her daughter Amelia out of school for the day. They call him Sexton, and ask him what he’s working on.

Amelia says she read his piece on the climate in the Guardian and found it very hopeful. She asks if he’s coming out with them tonight.

Sexton heads outside and, in lieu of the email, tries recording a phone message to Sylvie instead. But he is soon distracted by books he finds strewn about in the yard, and follows them like breadcrumbs to the top of a garbage heap.

Then, predictably, he falls off and hits his head.

A woman climbs over the garbage heap after him. She’s wearing an ankh around her neck; I bet she’s Death. She reaches out a hand to help him up. Just as he’s about to grab it, she pulls her hand away, then reaches out again with an, “Oh, I forgot, it’s my day off.” So now I’m sure she’s Death.

She invites him back to her place to give him some bandages for the cut on his arm. As they walk, she expresses her love for the sound of traffic, and he his dismay for how much we’ve filled the planet with our rubbish.

In her house, he finally introduces himself.

He asks her name, but she demurs: “I’m… very good at sewing.” Then he asks what she does: “I’d tell you, but you won’t believe me.” It’s odd - she looks entirely unprepared for these questions, which she surely must get every time she interacts with humans outside of ‘work’. Why doesn’t she already have a ready answer?

I’m not left to wonder for long. She tells him explicitly that she is Death, and reassures him that today is the one day off she takes every hundred years, which explains the lack of a ready answer. Interesting. Does that mean nobody worldwide will die today?

He, however, is not as intrigued as I am; clearly thinking he’s in the house of a crazy person, he makes his excuses and starts to leave2. “I’ll see you later,” she says. He looks surprised, and she elaborates: “Sooner or later I see everyone.”

As he exits the front door, he trips over a nearly invisible tripwire and falls down the front stairs. Upon which a creepy old woman approaches, smashes a bottle and threatens him. “I can smell her on you,” she says, and forces him to knock on Death’s door so she can gain entry to the apartment.

Turns out Death knows her. Her name is Mad Hettie, and she wants Death to find her soul. See, she hid it away somewhere safe - somewhere not even Death could find it, because if Death can’t find your soul she can’t take it - but she’s grown old and can’t remember where she put it.

Which immediately raises a few questions: What has suddenly changed in her life that she needs her soul to be with her, when she has (presumably) been doing fine without it for decades? If the whole point was to hide it from Death, wouldn’t Death be the worst person to send looking for it? Presumably her past self put it somewhere Death specifically would never think to look, and literally anybody else would stand a better chance of finding it. And isn’t she afraid that if Death finds it she’ll do with it exactly what hiding it was supposed to prevent in the first place?

Death agrees to take up the mission, and goes for a walk with Sexton. She orders a “veggie flatbread” from a street stall, and just as I’m about to start asking where she has money from, the vendor gives it to her for free because she’s beautiful and has a healthy appetite. So either this is Death’s magic or an example of the Bubble at work.

Sexton says he wants to go home now, because his roommate and her girlfriend are probably done having sex by now. (Wow did I totally misread their relationship in the opening scene…) But Death convinces him to get in a cab with her and experience all the things she wants to experience during her one day of living as a human.

Time skip to late that night. Somehow, they’re still in the cab; what have they been doing all this time?

Death asks the cabbie for her opinion: “What makes life worth living?” The cabbie gives her answer. Then Death asks Sexton, and he morosely says, “When you can go home after your roommates are done having sex”.

The cabbie then takes them to “The Undercut Club”. Death invites the cabbie to come in with them, but she demurs: “I’m on the clock.” She picked them up in midmorning! How long is her shift?!

The cabbie doesn’t ask for money when they leave, so it really is Death’s magic at work. Sexton even asks the cabbie about this mysterious behavior - and, with Death having walked out of range, she suddenly demands 60 quid from him.

As they head towards the club, they run into “Billie”, Sexton’s flatmate. Turns out she and Amelia didn’t end up having sex after all; they had a fight instead. Essentially, Amelia accused Billie of only being interested in the sex and never wanting to spend time with her friends - who are all inside the club right now.

Sexton introduces them to each other, making up the name “Didi” for Death. She and Billie team up to convince Sexton to come in, even though he’s dreading/hoping that his ex Sylvie might be there. And of course, by coincidence, they can get in for free because Amelia knows the guy at the door.

Inside, one of Amelia’s friends is clearly interested in Sexton but he doesn’t seem to notice or care. Death and Billie go aside discuss how miserable Sexton is; Billie used to be the same but being with Amelia changed her mind about life. Meanwhile, Sexton reassures Amelia: Billie had never been interested in sex before meeting you, so she’s obviously not with you just for that. Billie and Amelia make up.

When Sexton and Death head over to the bar, the drinks are of course on the house; this time the excuse is that the bartender/manager/house DJ is a good friend of Sexton and Sylvie, named Theo. Weird: so he’ll give Sexton drinks for free, but not let him into the club for free? Aha: as soon as Death leaves, her spell is lifted and Theo turns mildly hostile.

Later, Theo gets Death alone and seems obsessed with her ankh. They discuss immortality. “If you knew you could live forever, you don’t have to be afraid of anything or anyone,” he says.

One of Sexton’s friends pulls him aside. “What’s wrong with you?” she demands. “She’s clearly interested in you.” I don’t know if she’s talking about Didi or the other girl crushing on Sexton (whom I’ll call Other Girl, for lack of knowing her name). The camera seems to hint that she’s talking about Other Girl - but Sexton takes her to mean Didi, and objects that she’s “interested in everybody” and is insane, revealing that she thinks she’s the living incarnation of Death.

There’s a very brief montage of the others dancing, during which Sexton is standing out in the hall. Other Girl finds him outside and comments on his lack of participation.

He is despondent that the world is ending. Other Girl tells him a story about a girl who was abused, started cutting herself, woke up in the hospital, and was despite this glad to be still alive. It’s clear from the start that she’s talking about herself.

Upon which Death shows up: Theo has invited us on a tour showing us how this place used to be a department store!

“Us or you?” asks Sexton. “Me,” admits Death, “but I’m inviting you too.”

Theo shows them into a storeroom, then suddenly grabs Death’s necklace and tears it off. “I have your sigil, and now I decide who lives and dies!” he cries triumphantly. Death tries to object and explain that it’s just a necklace and doesn’t actually have her power, but he doesn’t listen and locks them in the room.

They explore the small space and discover arcane circles painted on the floor. “He summoned me here,” Death realizes.

Now that is interesting. I spent the first fifteen minutes of the episode marking all of the coincidences: the books that stopped Sexton from killing himself, led him up the pile of garbage, caused him to become trapped, brought him into contact with the eternally chipper Death… I thought that she had deliberately orchestrated all of these to teach Sexton a lesson.

Then I started to doubt it. Death seemed to be wholly oblivious, happy-go-lucky, breezing through her day off without much intentionality. Yet the coincidences kept piling up (the cabbie recommending the very club where Sexton used to go with Sylvie, and where his roommate happens to be today…). Could Death have just been acting happy-go-lucky?

But this scene presents a third possibility. Theo tried to summon Death, but it was her day off. So rather than appearing inside the circle in a puff of smoke, she had to be brought to him some other way. It looks like the universe made her collide with Sexton in just the right way that she could end up here.

Back to the episode. Death laments that she’s trapped in this storeroom for the remainder of her day off, when there were so many things she wanted to experience. And she hasn’t even found Mad Hettie’s soul!

Sexton searches the shelves and finds something he can use to bludgeon Theo when he comes back in, but Death warns him off of it: “You could hurt him!”

“Aren’t you Death?”

“Yeah, but I don’t go around killing people. They have free choice.”

“People don’t choose to die,” says Sexton, then catches himself, “…normally.”

She decides to probe his thoughts. Do you really think life is always miserable? “No,” he admits. “Sometimes it’s so nice that you forget there’s suffering everywhere.” He laments that nothing he does or says or writes makes a difference.

While they talk, Sexton comes up with an idea. He scatters marbles on the ground just inside the door, in the hope that Theo will slip on them when he enters.

Death points out that this activity proves that Sexton does want to live. But that’s when Theo comes in with a gun. And naturally, seeing Sexton crouched on the floor, he spots the marbles. So much for that plan.

But he’s got the gun pointed at Death rather than Sexton. Sexton pleads with him: “You have a gun! You already have the power to decide who lives and who dies. You don’t need to hurt her.” But Theo isn’t interested in the power to kill. He wants the power to resurrect, and has discovered that the ankh doesn’t give him that (or any) power. “Natalie,” Death realizes - someone Theo had mentioned earlier, but which I didn’t really absorb. “You did everything you could to try to save her,” she tells him. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Nobody’s going to believe that! Everyone will think I killed her! I’m going to spend the rest of my life in prison!” In despair, and with Death telling him that resurrection is simply not possible, Theo puts the gun to his own head.

Sexton lunges forward to stop him, Theo takes a step back - and slips on the marbles, falling and hitting his head on the ground. Hard.

Death urges Sexton to call an ambulance.

“Are you taking me now?” asks Theo.

“Not today,” says Death. “Today’s my day off.”

Fade to some time later, with Theo being treated in an ambulance. He has a concussion and they’ll keep him for observation overnight, but he’ll be fine.

Dawn finds Sexton and Death walking by the river. (So her 24 hours aren’t midnight-to-midnight; that’s good.) They find a stall selling necklaces, and she decides to buy a replacement ankh. How much? “For you…” says the vendor, but Sexton interrupts: “Just give it to her for free, we all know you’re going to.”

“…thirty quid,” finishes the vendor.

She only has 20 on her (she had said so earlier) so instead she takes a locket that’s slightly cheaper. She hands the locket to Sexton and tells him to give it to Mad Hettie. Then she stands up, takes in the world one last time, and dramatically collapses and dies.

As he’s desperately trying to revive her, Mad Hettie arrives. She asks for the two remaining pence that Death didn’t spend, and places them on Death’s eyes. Then she asks, did she give you something for me? He remembers the locket and hands it to her. Mad Hettie opens it to find a picture of her daughter - or, as she calls her, “My soul.”

Fade to later that day, when he’s telling the story to Billie. The paramedics say it was probably a heart attack. “What if she really was Death?” she asks.

He doesn’t believe that she was. It’s wishful thinking, he says: “Wouldn’t it be nice if Death was someone, not just pain and emptiness?” Which is odd, because at the start of the episode he didn’t believe that Death was pain, but rather a release from it.

Amelia and the friend from the nightclub arrive, because Billie said he never came home that night. Sexton invites the friend for a cup of tea.

Meanwhile, in a dark mirror of the world, Death wakes up. Another copy of her is standing there. “Was it worth it?” Death-Death asks human-Death.

“I wish it could’ve gone on forever,” replies human-Death.

Death-death takes her hand.

Lingering questions

• What exactly happens when Death takes her own hand? Do they merge? Does the human version of her die? Does she gain her own memories? If the real Death was always in the underworld, how exactly does the “day off” concept work?

• Did anybody actually die worldwide in those 24 hours? If not, will Sexton investigate and find out that it was all real? In the modern, digitized world, will somebody in the mid-2220s notice not only that nobody died for a day, but also spot the fixed intervals between the previous two times this happened?

• Does Death give off a give-me-everything-for-free aura? If so, why did it suddenly stop working at the end? If not, do beautiful people in London always get ridiculously expensive stuff for free?

Ratings

I evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.

The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; a low rating may reflect low quality, but it may also reflect a deliberate choice. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.

Story: 5/10. I rarely give scores this high for episodes that have no B plot. This one was simple but very well executed. The use of coincidences to keep the plot moving in the right direction is normally a massive problem, but I am choosing to read it as deliberate in this case. Were they just coincidences? Was Death orchestrating it deliberately, the way she seems to wrap the whole world around her little finger? Or was the universe pushing Death towards her destined arrival in the summoning room? I’m reasonably certain it was that last option, but the episode did a good job keeping me not only guessing but invested in the answer.

In fact, I would’ve scored this a 6, but I docked a point for the bad timekeeping. The episode is supposed to be 24 hours from start to finish, but nowhere near enough happened in it to cover that time. The episode heavily implies in the first few scenes that it was still before noon when Sexton first met Death (later confirmed by her departure taking place in mid-morning the next day). They pick up the cab around noon3, go on a drive through the park “at rush hour”, and accomplish nothing else until at least 9pm when they arrive at the club. Even if I generously assume they spend a couple of hours dancing, they’re locked in the storeroom for no more than ten minutes before they call the ambulance for Theo. Then Sexton and Death do… what? Walk and talk for another nine hours before buying the locket?

Some of these gaps can be filled in a bit by playing with the timeline, but in total they’re just too large.

Writing: 7/10. The writers masterfully skated the line between maybe-magic and maybe-mundane. We the viewers (and yes, I’m including myself despite having not seen the rest of the series) know with certainty that this woman really is Death herself. But Sexton was never given proof, not real proof, either way. Every time he thought he got a handle on how her magic pay-for-nothing power worked, he was thrown a curveball that made him question it all over again. And she never did anything overtly supernatural. The only thing she did that can’t be explained was know that his girlfriend’s name is Sylvie!

I also liked the way writers anticipated almost every “wait, but”-style question I had, and addressed it in the very next piece of dialogue. It happened so often it was a little bit spooky.

The only real complaint I have about the writing was the extended discussion about free will. Maybe that held more meaning for people who know about the character of Death and how she and her siblings work; for me it was vague and impenetrable.

Production: 4/10. Mostly standard production values for television. Music and set design were nothing to write home about. The actress playing Death did a great job portraying her sunny personality, but nobody else did overmuch with their parts.

The dark lighting in the club was a major problem. Perfectly realistic, sure, but I had a lot of trouble seeing who was talking at any given moment.

Characterization: 5/10. 3.5 of these points belong to Death, who had the perfect level of optimism and charm to contrast with her day job. 1.5 belong to Other Girl (the one who is attracted to Sexton, whose name I never learned), whose personality is less well developed but who has an interesting backstory that could be explored in depth.

Nobody else - Sexton included - seemed to have much of a personality. Sexton himself was written inconsistently, believing at the start of the episode that death was an escape from pain, which retroactively turned into death is pain.

Accessibility: 9/10. This is labeled as a “special episode” and it’s easy to see why. It’s a wholly self-contained story that, if I had to guess, shares exactly one character with the rest of the series. You don’t need to know anything about Dream, or the comics, or the world to be able to enjoy it. The only reason it doesn’t get a 10/10 is because of the darkness of the club that prevented me from recognizing who was who.

Closure: 8/10. It’s a standalone story, and closes out as such stories usually do. Sexton has taken out a new lease on life, and Death has gone back to her daily job. The mysteries that are left behind are mostly deliberate.

Do I want to watch the series now?

It’s very hard to tell. This episode is clearly unrelated to the main plot. What I enjoyed most about it, the deliberate ambiguities, are almost certainly not present in the rest of the series.

If the other episodes are anything like what I vaguely recall from the comics, they’ll be more overtly supernatural. Which can be good or bad; I just don’t know if they’ll be executed as well as the ambiguity was.

No-Thing on our Discord server

What do I know about this series going into it?

It centers on the town of Jericho, Kansas after a nuclear war. I caught a glimpse of the phrase “independent Texas government” while clicking through.

Previously On

An American flag with far fewer stars than normal, in a weird filled-in-circle shape. “Bonnie’s dead,” says Stanley1. “Goetz is off-limits,” says Beck2. “Stanley, don’t shoot that guy!” says… somebody else, but Stanley shoots anyway. Jericho is perpetrating an insurrection. Texas and the Western States are allying with Cheyenne. John Smith talks to a man who has a bomb; he’s going to take down one of the governments.

Recap

“Jake” and another guy are preparing to leave for Cheyenne. The other guy says “Cheung might be able to help”, but it’ll take too much time to contact him, so they’re on their own.

Jake: “Just one question. How are we going to find the bomb?”

Other Guy: “No idea.”

Elsewhere, an army officer holds a video conference with his subordinate. “It’s time to move to Phase Three,” he says, “because your area of the world is under insurrection.” The subordinate is hesitant but assents.

In the Federal District of Cheyenne, two guys in an elevator discuss the meetings they’re holding, and the worrying result of those meetings: the elimination of the Second Amendment. That helps establish some context: Cheyenne is the seat of government of what’s left of the US.

One of the two goes to his hotel room, where he discovers Jake and Other Guy lying in wait. They call him Gray, the mayor (I assume of Jericho), and they want his help. Jake looks out the window and mentions that “Jennings & Rall have already built their own country”. As he says so, the camera pans over to an enormous building with that name on it; the soundtrack informs us that whoever Jennings & Rall are, they’re evil.

After a very brief (<4 seconds) opening credits, Jake and Gray discuss how the ongoing convention - I’m guessing a constitutional convention? - is going to give the government the power to do anything it wants in the name of national security. Jake tells Gray that he needs to get back to the town; the people there need him.

Meanwhile, inside J&R, a man receives an encoded fax - a secret message telling him to meet Other Guy in Gray’s hotel room. The man is the aforementioned Cheung, and he reports what Other Guy already knows: that J&R’s secret intelligence has discovered the last nuke from the September Attacks is here in Cheyenne.

Back in Jericho, a neighborhood watch-like group discusses what the impending Phase Three means: Beck’s men have declared large parts of the town off-limits and will shoot anybody in those areas by tomorrow. They have to choices: lose their homes or fight back.

“This happened in New Bern a few weeks ago,” says a creepy guy who refers to himself in the third person as Phil Constantino. “And we know how to fight it.” The neighborhood watch leader, Eric, is willing to work with this Constantino against the military, but Stanley is pissed off: “Constantino is a psychopath! I’m done with this group, I’m going to go get my sister Bonnie’s body from the morgue and bury her.” He storms off; Eric orders a few people to go with him and help, and others to set up the meeting with Constantino - so I guess the creepy guy isn’t him after all.

In the army base, a woman is brought before Beck. “Why’d you do it?” he asks her. She claims not to know what he’s talking about - but the day before a “Robert Hawkins” was caught with a nuclear bomb of the same kind used in the “September Attacks”. The army had done an aerial survey that should’ve found it, Beck says - but the report from the survey is missing a page, and you were the only one who could’ve stolen it from my office.

She comes clean: “You agreed with me! You said there was something wrong, that the government lied to seize power. But you’re a coward and you won’t fight, and everyone in this town is suffering because of it!”

He arrests her.

Back in Cheyenne, Cheung has figured out where the bomb is: J&R are going to move it to a secure facility out of town to be dismantled. But they won’t use a massive convoy to do it, because that draws attention; they’ll move it secretly, in an ambulance. So they’re off to the hospital to steal it.

But seriously? To stop the bad guys from repealing the Second Amendment, the good guys are going to set off a nuclear bomb in the US capital? WTF?!

Cheung doesn’t know or trust Jake, so he orders him to stay in the car. Cheung and Other Guy go in alone, and make short work of the fake paramedics… until one of them turns out to be a sleeper agent for yet another faction. He shoots Cheung and Other Guy (finally giving me his name, Hawkins) and also the other fake paramedics. This is the John Smith who was mentioned in the previously. “I didn’t think you did your own dirty work,” says Hawkins. Smith says this is an exception and points his gun at Hawkins again - but Jake, having of course disobeyed Cheung, arrives just in time and saves Hawkins’s life by shooting Smith. He drags the wounded Hawkins into the ambulance and they drive off. Cheung, we hardly knew ye.

“What are we going to do now?” Jake asks Hawkins as he drives, Hawkins trying to patch himself up in the back. “Let me think of something,” says Hawkins.

Meanwhile, Beck is clearly harboring doubts. He orders a subordinate to bring him the evidence against Hawkins, which includes a laptop. He turns the laptop on and discovers a file dated 1993 containing the plans for the nuclear strikes - labeled with a Jennings & Rawl logo.

From the back of the ambulance, Hawkins calls up “Chavez”: “I’m going to need a favor and fast!”

In a field somewhere, Eric and his group are meeting with a bunch of people led by Timothy Omundson; I suspect this is the oft-mentioned Constantino. Everybody in both groups has a gun, and they quickly establish that they don’t just distrust each other, they hate each other. Eric, in fact, wanted to kill Omundson - and still does - and the only reason he didn’t is because the last time he tried Beck stopped him.

And anyway, he needs Omundson’s help to fight off the army. But Omundson sets some ground rules: We can only win by removing their desire to fight, which means that you stop leaving soldiers alive when you capture a convoy. And it won’t be simple - not a day or a week, but years. Are you in it for the long haul? Eric nods.

Hawkins’s driving directions have taken the ambulance to a gate, and Jake drives straight through it. A Texan flag can be seen; they’re at the Texan embassy to Cheyenne. They stop the car, and are quickly surrounded by Texan security and thrown to the ground. Just behind them, the Cheyenne military has arrived; they can’t violate the embassy’s sovereignty, but demand through a bullhorn that Texas surrender the two terrorists who just came in.

The Texan soldiers are inclined to listen - they have no idea who Jake and Hawkins are, nor why they should care - but just then the Texan ambassador emerges from the building. Whoever Hawkins called in San Antonio is very high up, and ordered the ambassador to accept their request for asylum.

Back in Jericho, the other group is has retrieved the sister’s body and are burying it (I forget both her and her brother’s name). Eric arrives and admits: “You were right, we can’t ally with Constantino and start killing American soldiers. We’ll just have to hope that Beck doesn’t want to fight us any more than we do.” But that’s probably wishful thinking, as a military vehicle starts approaching from the distance.

Hawkins gets patched up a bit by someone in the embassy, but she warns that he still needs to get to an ER. “No,” he says. “The most important thing is to get that bomb to Texas.” Because nobody in the embassy who can be spared to do it other than them3. What they’re about to do will change the course of the future!

At the cemetery, the soldiers call in the fact that they’ve found a group of “Rangers”. A woman begs them to at least give them half an hour to finish burying Bonnie.

The ambassador tells Jake and Hawkins that he’s loaded the bomb into a car with diplomatic plates, which will safely get them to the airport. “I’m glad somebody will show the world what President Tomarchio is really about,” he says.

Okay, I think I’ve finally figured out what the good guys are trying to do. They’re not trying to use the bomb; they want to bring it to Texas for analysis, so they can prove it was the same type that was used in the attacks on the US, thus proving that J&R were responsible for it.

When they reach the airport, Hawkins tells Jake to get on the plane without him; he’s dying anyway, so he might as well distract the Cheyennesians long enough for Jake to make it to Texas safely. Naturally, Jake doesn’t listen and loads him into the plane against his will. Soldiers arrive, but too late to stop the plane from taking off.

As the Rangers finish burying Bonnie, more military vehicles roll up. Beck emerges from one of them, and I finally get a good look at his uniform; I noticed earlier that it didn’t say U.S. ARMY, but only now do I get a close enough look to see it actually says A.S. ARMY. Beck crosses himself, expresses sorrow for their loss, says they’re free to go, then turns away.

Beck turns back around and announces that 20 minutes ago he told his superiors he’s not taking orders anymore because the government is corrupt. He’ll face court-martial for treason by the end of the day4 but he’ll still be in charge until that happens.

Jake’s Cessna, en route to San Antonio, is quickly tailed by two fighter jets from the Allied States (aha!) Air Force. If he doesn’t allow them to escort him back to Cheyenne, they will shoot him down5. Luckily, however, two other fighter jets arrive from ahead of him: it’s the Texas Air National Guard, who make short work of the two Allied States fighters6.

Back at the cemetery, a woman confesses her love to Stanley and proposes marriage to him.

Beck has released the woman he arrested earlier, and has shown his subordinates the document proving that J&R committed the strike against the US. Are they going to turn him in? Of course not: they emerge from the room and one of them dramatically removes the AS flag from his sleeve, followed by the others. They’ve all joined his rebellion.

The Rangers meet with Mayor Gray in the town square, where he’s raised a Don’t Tread on Me Flag.

And finally, Jake lands in Texas. They’re going to analyze the bomb and expose Cheyenne’s cover-up, then side with Columbus (yet another faction of the US, I assume?) in the impending civil war. “The war is coming with or without us,” says Hawkins. “I just hope we’ve made it a fair fight.”

Lingering questions

• What if the analysis doesn’t show the bomb was of the same type? That might turn out to be embarrassing.

• Is Texas going to actually use the bomb in battle? If not, what did Hawkins mean when he said he made it a “fair fight”? Who will win the war between them and Columbus?

• Will the insurrection within the Allied States spread? How much will it undermine the Cheyenne war effort?

• Is J&R’s plan simply to rule over a remnant of the United States? How does that benefit them? Surely the rest of the world - places like China and Russia - have been busy taking advantage of the US’s removal from the world stage. Won’t the Allied States quickly become subordinate to them?

Ratings

I evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.

The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; a low rating may reflect low quality, but it may also reflect a deliberate choice. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.

Story: 5/10. A fairly standard A-and-B plot structure. There were hesitant approaches towards additional subplots (the woman in the army base; the meeting with Constantino; Mayor Gray heading home) but none of these had much substance to them.

The episode made little effort to surprise; most new developments were exactly what you’d expect based on what happened immediately before. I guessed right away, for example, that Jake would disobey Cheung and come to their rescue, and that Beck arrived at the funeral to announce his Heel-Face Turn. I didn’t expect Cheung to die, having assumed that he was a major supporting character, and the use of the Texan embassy to get away was a clever twist, but almost everything else was predictable. It wasn’t bad, just run-of-the-mill.

Writing: 5/10. The word “mediocrity” usually has negative connotations, but here I’m going to use it in its most literal sense: this was an okay episode of perfectly average network television. I was tempted to dock a point for the frankly ridiculous dialogue between Stanley and the woman proposing to him (whose name I never learned), but it’s only one bad moment.

Production: 4/10. The acting, the soundtrack, the set design… I hate to say the same thing three categories in a row, but there’s simply nothing that stands out for good or for bad.

I did dock a point for substandard editing; the scene transitions were too frequent and sometimes jarring. And there was a weird moment near the beginning where a caption identified the setting as the Federal District of Cheyenne, which was the only setting caption in the entire episode. You can’t include a caption in the show’s visual language and then fail to use them ever again!

Characterization: 3/10. Here is where being generic is actively substandard. I can’t name a single personality trait of a single character in this episode. Maybe, if I extrapolate from extremely limited info, I can hazard a guess that Stanley is a hothead. But beyond that? Is Beck really as cowardly as he is accused of being? Is Jake naive? Gray ambitious? Hawkins superstitious? From my point of view one could slot any character into the role played by any other character and nothing would have changed.

Worse, the episode didn’t contain a single named antagonist. Everybody here is a good guy, and their opponents are the faceless goons working for the Cheyenne government. There’s no Darth Vader, Scorpius, or Hannibal Lecter to root against, so rooting for the heroes feels empty.

Accessibility: 6/10. Until the very end, when the penny finally dropped, I was perpetually confused by why the protagonists needed that nuclear weapon so badly. The sudden mention, five minutes before the end, of another faction in the US was jarring. And I have no idea who this John Smith is or what he wanted.

But despite all that I didn’t feel very confused. The line between good guys and bad guys was fairly bright, I learned most of the characters’ names pretty quickly, and not knowing who was who didn’t matter all that much. It was easy to relax and enjoy the ride.

Closure: 4/10. The episode ended with the heroes having achieved a significant yet wholly preliminary victory - which makes it very unusual for a finale.

They didn’t complete a major objective, which would signify a high amount of closure; they didn’t effect a major change to the status quo, which would make it about average; they didn’t suffer a massive setback, which would reduce closure to nearly zero. Instead, they achieved a tiny victory that might have massive effects but it’s too soon to tell.

Did the war begin? Maybe - but countries have shot down one another’s aircraft before and diplomats were able to sort it out without a war starting. Was J&R’s plot revealed to the world? Not quiet yet, and we aren’t certain that it will be, because Texas hasn’t analyzed the bomb yet. So we’re stuck with this sort of anti-cliffhanger: left in suspense not because of the villains’ achievement but because of the heroes’.

Do I want to watch the series now?

I’m afraid I just couldn’t find anything in the episode to get excited about. It’s entirely too average a network television show.

Consistent-Fruit-185 on Reddit

What do I know about this series going into it?

Never heard of it. While clicking through I caught a glimpse of the words “conspiracy”, “virus”, and “vaccine”.

Recap

A creepy man strikes up a conversation with a woman in a bus terminal. He’s going away to “a place where nobody can find” him; the woman, utterly failing to realize he’s obviously a serial killer, sincerely tells him that that sounds nice.

She, for her part, is taking her son on vacation to the south of France - by bus rather than by train, because of the environmental impact. “Oh yes, we should all think of the environment,” says Creepy Man - and proceeded to rant to her about how having the kid in the first place is worse for the environment than anything else she could possibly do.

“If you really cared about the environment,” he says. “You would cut his throat right now. I could do it for you! I’ll get out my knife!” She stares at him, deer-in-the-headlights style, until he finally gets up and leaves for his bus.

So I’m guessing he’s the one who’s going to release the virus.

Previously On

This is unusual and unexpected: the Previously On comes after the teaser. It is, as usual, rapid-fire and I can barely type fast enough to follow it:

• “They are sleeper agents, trained, brainwashed,” says Anton1.

• “Geoff should announce V-Day,” says Milner2.

• “Eat my fucking chip3!” shouts a man with a hole in his head.

• “Janus stops the vaccine from working,” says a man missing an eye.

• A woman makes a phone call: “Commence,” she says, then gloats that she can’t be shot. She gets shot anyway. A man sobs over her body: “Milner!”

Recap (resumed)

Wilson and Becky4 are looking through an observation window at a man lying in a hospital bed. The blonde woman inside is named Jessica. “He’s not going to make it,” observes Wilson, who has an eyepatch.

Elsewhere in the hospital, a black man with glasses is watching a news report: “Ian Johnson” is wanted for the murder of two people, one of whom is his own brother Roy Johnson; their mother Theresa is calling for him to turn himself in.

Wilson and Becky enter and update him (they seem to be his superiors): Milner called somebody and ordered him to release Russian flu from five secret locations around the world. The virus is going to be released just before V-day, 90 days from now. But we have to be careful, because whoever she called is watching The Network (whatever that is) and will enact the secondary protocol if he realizes they’re on to him.

In fairness, the other guy could probably have guessed what the secondary protocol is: the virus will be released immediately instead of in 90 days. The three of them need to stop it on their own and can’t go to the authorities to do so.

From what they’ve uncovered so far about the conspiracy, there are three possible people who Milner called. Whoever she called will vanish from his cover identity and begin the work. They only know the identity of one of them - a guy named Paul - so if they go to look for Paul and he’s gone, they’ll at least know who they’re looking for. So Wilson, Becky, and (I finally learn his name) Ian head out. On the way, Becky warns Wilson not to give their targets a dramatic name like The Three.

Meanwhile, in a suburban home, Dugdale5 is teaching his daughter math. His son, Grant, comes in and takes a butcher knife from the kitchen. Dugdale demands that Grant put it back; Grant brushes him off, and Dugdale meekly does nothing about it.

Back to Wilson, Ian, and Becky. They’re in a van somewhere, and Ian is berating Wilson: Did you have fun betraying us and joining the people who killed my brother?

Wilson barely gets to answer when they spot Paul. Which is a serious problem, because now they know that Milner called one of the other two people - and they know nothing about who those people are.

Ah well, nothing for it. Wilson pulls out a gun: just in case there’s yet another backup plan (what if the bad guys find out their boss Milner is dead?), they should kill Paul right now. Becky and Ian freak out: Stop it, we’re not killers!

So instead they break into Paul’s house and search it. Wilson quickly concludes that they’ve found nothing. But they need to do something to prevent Paul from getting suspicious that they’re on to him:

Ian, who retains a vestige of sanity, refuses and leaves the room. So while Wilson’s doing that, Ian and Becky (or possibly Leah? Wilson’s mentioned a Leah a few times and I think I might have this character’s name wrong) find a secret cell phone. Wilson easily breaks into it because it hasn’t been updated, though I suspect he didn’t wash his hands first.

There’s only one number saved in the phone: that of Dobri Gorski, Donaldson’s professor, who told him about Jimmy Deech. I have no idea who any of those people are.

While Wilson makes a call, Becky-or-Leah takes a pill. “It must be available somewhere,” says Ian tenderly. But whatever medication she’s taking isn’t available elsewhere; it’s top-secret, and when it runs out in four days she’ll die.

Wilson returns and reports that Dobri Gorski is already in custody for murder. “I’ll call Leah,” he says, establishing that the woman in the room with him is Becky. “She’ll get us access.”

Cut to a man eating toast in a bathtub. I briefly think this is going to be Gorski, but this doesn’t look like a prison cell. In comes the guy from the bus station; his name is Terrence. “Where is it?” Terrence demands, pointing a gun. Toast Man points him to the fireplace, and Terrence retrieves not the virus but rather a piece of paper listing two locations. “Trager has the others,” says Toast Man.

As thanks for the information, Terrence goes and gets a radio.

He drops the radio into the bathtub and, well, the nickname I gave Toast Man turns out to be more apt than I thought.

Meanwhile, a crazy old man covered with blood is drawing molecules on a whiteboard. A woman comes in, probably his daughter, and tries talking to him, but he responds with gibberish. “Don’t do that,” she says. “We need to get to know each other.”

“She’s dead, Jessica,” Crazy Old Man says in English. Ah, this must be the man who sobbed over Milner in the Previously. I think these two must be the bad guys.

Meanwhile, in a hospital, a man in a biohazard suit enters the room with the unconscious guy that Wilson and Becky were looking at earlier. He’s about to remove the feeding tube when Jessica Hyde6 comes in with a gun. “I’ve got a good grip on the tubes,” he says.

“Take your hands off those tubes and I’ll let you walk out,” she counters.

But he’s not scared of her; he’s scared of the unconscious man. “He wants me dead, Jess,” which is why he is… prepared to die in order to kill him?

Jess reaches the same conclusion I did and calls his bluff. The guy releases the tubes peacefully and walks out.

Meanwhile, at the police station, Becky is walking down a hallway when the world suddenly spins around her. She takes another pill, but before it can take effect she hallucinates a conversation with the man from the Previously who had the hole in his head. Eventually the hallucination wears off, and she discovers Wilson has been standing there. He’s looked at the police report: Gorski had faked his own death by finding somebody of his own age and build, driving a truck over his skull, and removing his own teeth with a hammer to put them inside the dead man’s mouth.

So let’s go in and talk to the lunatic! “I gave my life to Janus,” says Gorski. “But now that it’s here I’m afraid. I don’t want to die.” So Janus is the evil environmentalist organization that wants to release a virus and kill most or all of humanity to save the planet.

“Why would Janus kill you?” Becky asks.

“I trained them. I know who they are,” he replies.

Wilson asks for the names of the other two; Gorski asks for protection in return. Wilson happily grants it, but Gorski immediately regrets it. Nobody can protect me from Janus!

But he presumably has worked out the obvious: better to take a chance that these people can stop Janus before he kills you, than to die for certain when the virus is released. He gives the names: Terrence Truman and Michael Johns.

Wilson gets up and leaves, waving away Gorski’s desperate objections: “You’re in a police station, he can’t get to you.” Wilson is an idiot.

Cut to Wilson and Crazy Old Man sitting on the floor together, talking about how the latter shot people he loves. This scene is oddly tinted in bright yellow, so it’s clearly not actually taking place - but I can’t tell if it’s COM hallucinating, Wilson doing some wishful thinking that he can have a heart-to-heart with his opponent, or a flashback to a conversation that really happened.

But suddenly Leah interrupts the conversation and delivers an update to the both of them: We’ve located Michael Johns, still at his job, so the man we’re looking for is Terrence. So I guess this must be reality after all; I’ll have to significantly reassess what I think is going on here, if Crazy Old Man and Wilson are actually working together for Leah. But at least I understand a bit more: it’s only Becky and Ian who are civilians, while Wilson works for this secret spy agency.

Oh, and Leah has “taken care” of Michael and of Paul.

Meanwhile, Terrence gets the location of two more canisters from a fishmonger - then shoots him. I’m starting to think working for Janus isn’t a long-term investment.

Back to the spy agency: “Bad news, he’s killing people,” says Leah. She lists Danny Silbert, a former Network virologist and current7 Toast Man; and John Trager, the fishmonger, who also used to work for them. So this “Network” is the name of the spy agency; they’re the good guys, but Janus’s people are all recruited from within it, HYDRA-style. And the connection between Janus’s recruits? They all went to the same university.

Two men meet in a field in the middle of nowhere. One, “Geoff”, hands the other, “Michael”, a recorded confession; he plans to flee the country, and wants Michael to send the confession to an address and corroborate its contents. In return, Michael will get 5 million pounds. Michael is pissed off: “What about my family? Did you forget about them?” and beats the crap out of Geoff. “You want me to get you out? You’re going to stay where you are and do what you’re told.”

I don’t get it. Are these good guys, bad guys? What was that all about?

Meanwhile, Grant has returned to the kitchen and mocks his sister for doing her French homework. His mother calls him over.

She proceeds, however, to tell him what to do anyway: don’t scare Alice, and bring back the knife you took. “Yes, Mrs. Dugdale,” he says, so I’m guessing he’s adopted; she tells him to call her Jen (not mom?). Alice smiles a secret smile, thankful that at last one of her parents is putting a foot down.

Back at Network, Jessica has taken Ian aside and wants to have sex with him in a cupboard8. “I’m with Becky,” he says. “But not for long,” Jessica replies, callously.

That’s when Becky cries out in the other room that she’s found the link: Donaldson studied at the same university as all these people they’re tracking, and Dobri Gorsky was their professor.

I don’t know who Donaldson is. But I’m a bit surprised that it took them this long to connect the dots between “Gorsky is a professor” and “all the people working for Janus went to the same university”.

While they’re oohing and aahing over this piece of not-news, Terrence gains access to the ventilation system in Gorski’s cell and floods it with petrol.

The Network is still trying to catch up: they learn that Terrence broke into Gorski’s house the night before, and have somehow figured out that 1) this means he has the locations of all five canisters; 2) that he will obtain the closest canister first; and 3) the closest canister is in a car park in Denham. They run Gorski’s credit card records to find out which car park it was, and Ian and Jessica head out9.

In the car park, Terrence obtains a hidden canister from behind a car’s headlight, gets into his car, and starts to drive away with it - right into an ambush that Jessica has rigged up. She fires a dozen shots at him, but unfortunately his car is bulletproof; fortunately, in his panic to get away he drives right into another car. She reloads and approaches, still shooting like a lunatic without even trying to check where Terrence is or whether he’s still inside.

Which of course he isn’t, and no explanation is offered for how he got out while she was watching. He makes it to a stairwell, wounded, and staggers up the stairs. He knows he won’t get far, so he pauses to put on gloves in preparation for releasing the virus10. He keeps Jessica at bay by shooting at her from above as she climbs the stairs after him, and reaches the roof - where Ian ambushes him and stabs him in the gut.

Seriously wounded, Terrence starts to open the canister. But Ian begs him: Please don’t do it! The vaccine doesn’t work, it’s going to kill millions! I guess he doesn’t know that Terrence is happy to kill as much of humanity as possible, vaccine or no vaccine. Ultimately, he’s forced to shoot Terrence dead to stop him.

Jessica arrives and holds Ian’s hand in comfort.

Denouement. Ian arrives in the hospital and embraces Becky, who is still hallucinating the guy with the hole in his head (finally identified as “Marius”). She hands Ian a vial. She’s only got two days of Thoraxin left, she says, and wants to go out on her own terms; this vial of “Nembetal” must be an assisted suicide thing.

Back home, Mr. Dugdale - who is the guy from the field with Geoff, I hadn’t recognized him without his glasses - is shocked to discover that Grant is suddenly very well behaved; he’s done the dishes and has agreed to let Alice help him with his schoolwork. “I don’t understand it either,” says Mrs. Dugdale, demonstrating the causal reasoning prowess of a six-month-old.

Dugdale (first name Michael; I’d forgotten) then goes to Wilson and asks for the fake IDs that will get him and his family out of the country. But Wilson has his mind on other things: I’ve-forgotten-her-name was wrong, he says, to try to release the virus on humanity. Losing so much life is unacceptable… but losing some is. What they should do is release the virus in an isolated village somewhere so that it can’t spread throughout the world. They don’t need a pandemic to get people to take the vaccine; just the fear of one.

What exactly does this vaccine do, that the Network is so desperate to get all of humanity to take it? Is it a sterilization program, tied to the Terrence’s environmental extremism11? Or is there some other reason?

As Dugdale watches in horror, Wilson says that he’s not going to let him flee the country after all; instead he’ll be tagged and followed with agents and cameras at all times. “But don’t worry,” he says. “I’ll free you after we do this.”

“This isn’t you!” exclaims Dugdale; I hadn’t noted it, but this is like the fourth time somebody said that to Wilson this episode.

“I don’t think I am me,” he says. What the hell is going on with him?

Meanwhile, in a hotel room somewhere, Geoff opens up a suitcase full of money, laughing maniacally. But he notices a strange residue on the bills, and we cut to later - with two people in biohazard suits killing the virus with ultraviolet light and tampering with the scene to make Geoff’s death look like a suicide.

Back in the hospital, Jessica watches jealously as Ian and Becky canoodle. When Ian leaves to get some champagne, she comes in and kisses Becky on the top of the head. But then she asks: “Are you doing right by Ian to force him to look into your eyes as you die?” A freaky and manipulative question - but we can see that it gets to Becky.

Wilson has another meeting, with a man in a yellow suit and yellow paint on his face; I think he’s the guy who tried to kill Jessica’s brother. Wilson draws a gun. “This isn’t you,” says the Yellow Man. Wilson shoots him.

So has Wilson been replaced by Janus? Has he secretly been Janus the whole time?

Meanwhile, Crazy Old Man has news for Ian: there is no such thing as Thoraxin. Becky is perfectly fine. The pills she’s been taking are causing her hallucinations12. “Why would Donaldson do this?” Ian asks; I still have no idea who Donaldson is. “Some people need to control others,” answers COM. Ian rushes over to tell Becky - but it’s too late. Thanks to Jessica’s meddling, she’s taken the suicide drug.

Elsewhere in the building, Wilson meets Leah. They nod to one another, and she leaves the room - upon which Wilson, too, commits suicide, as the camera pans over a book that displays the Chinese ideogram for “rabbit”. Why? Why not?

Two Network goons grab COM just before he can escape the building. Ian, desperately performing CPR on Becky, manages to get her to vomit up the poison - but other Network goons grab him and Jessica as well. And meanwhile, Jessica’s brother wakes up from his coma. I bet the claim that he would never recover was always a lie, just the Network manipulating Jessica, just as they invented a disease to manipulate Becky and Ian.

We return to Wilson, who it turns out hasn’t committed suicide; he used the knife to carve the symbol for Rabbit into his chest. WHY?!

He stands up, oblivious to his open chest wound, and opens the door to the chamber containing the five canisters of virus.

Lingering questions

• Who is the real Janus? Wilson? Leah? Somebody else? Has Wilson been a Janus sleeper agent all along?

• What does the vaccine do and why does the Network want everyone to take it?

• With Jessica, Ian, and Crazy Old Man in custody (and presumably Becky as well, since she’s in the next room puking her guts out), who if anybody can stop the Network? Will Michael find a way to get a message out despite being under surveillance? Is the Network aware that Jessica’s brother is awake, or is he free to act?

• How long will Grant’s good behavior last? Will his parents figure out what caused the change or remain oblivious?

Ratings

I evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.

The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; a low rating may reflect low quality, but it may also reflect a deliberate choice. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.

Story: 7/10. A well-plotted, well-executed thriller with numerous twists and turns.

There’s one big issue I have with the plot: the idea that Terrence was “watching the Network” and threatening to enact his secondary protocol. As an excuse for why the main characters need to do all the investigating themselves without the resources of their organization, it’s better than what we usually get. But that excuse lasts for all of ten minutes until they discover that Terrence is going straight to the secondary protocol anyway. So what was the point of introducing this concept? There are two possibilities, and each one results in both a script problem and a plot hole:

• Perhaps the writers intended it to explain why the main characters (as opposed to specialists who work for the Network) were the ones breaking into Paul’s house. As soon as that scene was over, the excuse was no longer needed, and they jettisoned it.

  • Script problem: Somebody should’ve explicitly said, after they found out about Terrence, that they were now free to use all of the Network’s resources.

  • Plot hole: Ian is inexplicably the only person available to stop Terrence in the car park, which is why he needs to beg Jessica to come with him. This is the exact same problem that the “secondary protocol” was supposed to solve in the Paul’s house scene earlier, only made more obvious because the excuse is gone.

• Perhaps the writers intended it to explain why the main characters couldn’t use Network resources throughout the episode.

  • Script problem: The main characters do use Network resources throughout the episode - gaining access to the police station (twice), assassinating the two people who Milner didn’t call, accessing Gorski’s credit card history, etc. There needed to be at least a line of dialogue acknowledging these and hand-waving them as too small for Terrence to notice.

  • Plot hole: As soon as they discovered that Terrence was already enacting the secondary protocol, they should’ve been free to do whatever they liked.

But don’t let my long-winded exploration of the above fool you: it’s a minor issue in a story for which I have mostly praise. Wilson’s turn to evil was set up very carefully, so that when it came it felt both surprising and earned (a rare combination). I was kept guessing as to the Network’s motivations through13 the very end. And the vast majority of the episode works well as a procedural.

The subplots, too, mostly worked. In particular, the love triangle and Becky’s illness-that-never-was were interwoven very well with the main story. I wish I knew what the heck was going on between Jessica’s brother and the Man in Yellow; between Jessica herself and the Crazy Old Man who is probably her father; and between Geoff and Michael - but I never penalize the episode for things I don’t understand. Really the only subplot that falls flat is that of Grant.

Writing: 5/10. The strongest aspect of the script is the repeated hints that something is wrong with Wilson, very nicely setting up the reveal of whatever brainwashing he’s undergone. Beyond that, the script is fairly generic, with a couple of unintentionally silly moments that undermine it. Ian holding Becky’s face and imploring her to look at him, then asking if her hallucination is still in the corner of the room - I laughed out loud at that, because of course she had to stop looking at him in order to answer his question. And Grant suddenly becoming an angel after suffering the mildest criticism any parent ever gave a child for bad behavior? Mrs. Dugdale being utterly mystified that a child began to behave better moments after she established clear boundaries for him, and not understanding the connection between the two events? I really hope those aren’t indicative of what the writers think parenting is like.

Production: 8/10. A couple of bad scene transitions, and very questionable color grading in the COM-Wilson heart-to-heart. But the sets are great; the camerawork is great; and the music is phenomenal, reminiscent of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (I’m sure they were done by the same composer).

The acting was very strong. I want to single out Jessica, who is doing something fascinating with her character, but I can’t because everybody was doing a great job: Ian pleading with Terrence not to make him shoot him; Becky’s facial expression when Jessica’s parting shot hits the bullseye; Wilson perfectly straddling the line between trustworthy and psychotic; and even the woman in the bus terminal in the opening scene, suddenly discovering she’s talking to a lunatic and freezing in panic.

Characterization: 8/10. Good acting usually goes hand-in-hand with good characterization, and that’s definitely the case here. I am fascinated by Jessica’s behavior (she reminds me of Parker from Leverage) and want to know her backstory. Wilson, even before he is brainwashed, perfectly portrays the morally complex government agent who is theoretically good but regularly does evil and probably has a dozen closets14 full of skeletons. I’m curious as to Leah’s history and motivations and suspect we never get much of a window into either.

Accessibility: 3/10. This was a very difficult episode to follow. The opening scenes of were such a flood of random names that even when they were connected to characters I knew, I frequently missed them: Ian and Becky and Leah and Donaldson and Dugdale and Terrence and Paul and Geoff and Michael and Jessica… it wasn’t until after I checked my notes that I realized that Ian was the same guy who was wanted for murder (for reasons I don’t know) and that Jessica is the woman with a close relationship to COM (possibly father-daughter, but I’m still not sure). It took me ages to realize that Michael Dugdale was Grant’s adoptive father, and I still have no idea who or what Donaldson is.

Even the main plot, which I think I mostly understand, remains semi-opaque. Is the Network a government organization or a private one? How does Janus intersect with it? They both seem to want the same thing - create a pandemic to distribute a vaccine - but I have no idea why, nor why they are nevertheless opposed to each other (beyond Ian’s cryptic statement to Terrence that the vaccine doesn’t work).

Closure: 2/10. A massive cliffhanger! Wilson has turned evil and is about to release the virus; COM, Jessica, and Ian are in custody at gunpoint; Geoff is dead; Michael is neutralized; and the real Janus is still out there. The reader who requested this show said that it “never got a proper finale”, and they weren’t kidding.

Do I want to watch the series now?

Yes! I’m desperately curious to get all the answers to all my questions about the world they’re in. It’s a fascinating setting and I want to devour it from the beginning.

.· Ben ⬩ Salvidrim! ·. on our Discord server. Thank you for supporting the Substack!

What do I know about this series going into it?

I’d never heard of it prior to the request. I know only that it was extremely difficult to find, that it’s a non-children’s1 animated series that takes place in space, and there’s a character called “Invictus”.

Previously On

A rapid-fire sequence of quotes:

“Invictus is where I should’ve been all along,” says Ash2.

“Little Cato!” cries Avocato.

“Lord Commander is now a Titan,” says Sheryl.

“The hyper-[something] bridge is now lost in space,” says Biskit.

Well, that didn’t provide much to start off with…

Recap

A blond man with yellow lightning bolts on his neck is sitting in a spaceship, despondent. Suddenly he gets up with a look of determination and, accompanied by other crewmen, heads out into a hangar.

They are greeted by a small white catman, who calls two of them “Gary” (I assume the blond human) and “Avocato” (I assume the larger black catman). He’s prepared a new ship for them to use, whose design is reminiscent of a fighter plane.

Before boarding the fighter, Gary orders a floating green blob to help “Quinn” get the “bridge” back online; it’s unclear if he’s referring to the bridge of the spaceship they’re in, or the hypersomething bridge that was lost in space during the Previously. Quinn is the woman standing next to him; he embraces her, then boards the fighter with Avocato. They soon discover that White Catman has loaded an AI named “H.U.E.” onto the fighter as a pleasant surprise for them.

The opening sequence shows Gary, sans spaceship, tumbling through a wormhole.

Reaching the bridge of the main vessel, Quinn asks another woman if she’s “ready to do this”. Other Woman is decidedly not ready, but tosses Quinn “Nightfall’s helmet” anyway.

(Running underneath this scene are the opening credits, from which I recognize Fred Armisen and David Tennant.)

It seems, however, that whatever they’re trying to do is impossible. White Catman complains that Green Alien Blob overloaded something and something else doesn’t work and so on; I was able to absorb none of this.

Quinn hangs her head. “There’s no hope,” she says. But that statement activates something in the helmet: a projection of a recording from someone named “Nightfall”, who says they can extract the thermogenic power core that’s inside the helmet’s eye. Quinn can release it using a retinal scan.

But Quinn doesn’t want to put the helmet on, because it’ll turn her into Nightfall. I think Nightfall is a future version of herself, whom Quinn dislikes.

They have no choice, however, and the recording and Other Woman convince Quinn to do it anyway. You won’t become somebody else, they say; who you are in the future is just the result of the decisions you make.

Elsewhere, a woman and a small orange catman (what’s with all the catmen?) are diving headfirst into a purple expanse. When they land, they are confronted by an enormous eye:

Orangecat is, understandably, freaked out at the arrival of Sauron and begs the woman (whom he calls Ash) to let him leave. But Ash reacts with fury: “Avocato killed your real parents! Nightfall is a shell of her former self!”

Outside the purple expanse, Gary and Avocato have arrived; these are “Little Cato’s” - I assume Orangecat’s - last known coordinates. They conclude that Ash must have taken Little Cato into the black hole, so they tell H.U.E. to dive right into it. They recognize the eye as “Invictus”, and H.U.E. detects Little Cato. Gary and Avocato eject and, using rocket boots, dive down to the rescue.

They land on the other side of Little Cato, Ash having moved toward the eye.

Ash tells Little Cato: “They don’t deserve you and never will”.

Little Cato turns to Avocato and pleads: “Did you do it? Did you kill my parents?!”

Avocato lowers his head and softly admits, “Yes.”

Ash: “I told you. They don’t deserve you.”

Gary tries to convince Cato otherwise, but Cato ignores him and addresses Avocato directly. “Why did you do it?” “Because I’m a killer.” “Why didn’t you kill me?” “Because when I saw you, you gave me purpose.3”

Avocato throws down his guns and approaches Little Cato. “Being your father is the only thing I want to be.”

Ash starts to panic that Cato might actually change his mind, so she unleashes a sort of windstorm to keep Avocato and Gary from getting any closer. But when Gary apologizes to Ash for failing her, that breaks through her anger and she pauses.

Meanwhile, on board the fighter, H.U.E. receives a message from White Catman: Surprise #2! He’s built H.U.E. a robot body. H.U.E. leaps out of the ship and interposes himself between Ash and the heroes, just before she recovers from the shock and resumes her windstorm.

Invictus, however, is tired of this. “I’ll take care of them,” he says, and unleashes a horde of zombies from his pupil. Then he fires an energy beam that destroys all the zombies but one. What? I’m not following this at all.

Meanwhile, Quinn and Green Alien Blob (“Mooncake”?) are conducting a spacewalk, fixing the ship according to instructions provided by White Catman (“Bizkit”?) over the radio. Mooncake fires an energy beam to charge up the capacitor (or something) but is a bit of an idiot, charging it up way too much, forcing Quinn’s sidekick robot KVN4 to throw himself into the beam before it overloads. KVN’s not dead - I don’t think - and the enormous Stargate that the ship is attached to powers up.

There’s just one problem: there’s nobody to activate the other end of the Stargate. Quinn sends out a message in desperation but nobody answers.

Back inside the black hole, it turns out I got it wrong before; the zombies hadn’t come out of Invictus’s pupil but rather another portal that opened up. All of them died to Invictus’s eyebeam save for a giant-brained (and evil-looking) creature named Lord Commander. He and Ash have a history: he broke her hands, and she wants to return the favor. They fight, and H.U.E. takes advantage of the distraction to grab Gary and the Catos5.

They flee in the fighter craft, forgetting to ask Little Cato first if he even wants to go with them.

Gary calls up Quinn: Is the bridge active? Quinn says yes, but without anybody to turn on the stargate at the other end they’re not “getting out”.

There’s an odd intonation on the way she says that phrase; she’s not using it to mean “getting out of here” but rather “getting out of the place we’re trapped in”. Almost as though, even though Gary et al have just escaped one black hole, they’re still trapped inside a higher-level black hole.

While I’m pondering this, Gary admits he loves Quinn, upending what I was so far assuming was his relationship with Avocato.

That’s when a six-eyed alien appears next to Quinn. “I’m always listening,” he says (she clearly knows him). “In fact, I wish I could stop listening.” But he’s turned on the other end of the bridge for them.

Gary lands the ship in the hangar. “Let’s get out of Final Space!” he declares, and the ship races for the portal. Too late, though: Ash appears behind them and grabs their ship in a tractor beam.

Mooncake decides to sacrifice himself. He (she? it?) flies through the hangar forcefield and fires a laser beam at Ash, distracting her enough that the ship can continue moving.

Ash turns her rage towards Mooncake.

“He never hurt you, please!” pleads Gary6.

“You took so many things from me,” rages Ash, “And I’m going to return the favor.” She grabs Mooncake and absorbs his power - which somehow frees Invictus from the black hole. Green tendrils emerge from it, while inside Invictus seals Lord Commander inside a crystal cube.

The good guys have no choice but to leave Mooncake behind. The ship makes it through the portal just before Invictus blasts it to smithereens.

Gary is despondent: He left Mooncake behind to die. But he doesn’t get a chance to mourn for very long, because a rift has opened in space. “My God, what have we done?” he asks, as a Galactus-style monster appears outside of the rift, and tendrils of power begin tearing apart the planets. The end credits roll, with no “To Be Continued” in sight…

Lingering questions

• Did Ash already have the ability to release Invictus or was she able to do so only because of the power she drew from Mooncake? If the latter, why did Mooncake bring himself within her grasp?

• How, if at all, can Invictus be stopped?

• If I’m right about my guess that Nightfall is a future version of Quinn - presumably one that dies and bequeaths her the helmet in a stable time loop - how much has she told her younger self about the timeline? Has she left more hidden messages that will guide her at exactly the right moment?

• Why does Quinn so strongly fear becoming Nightfall? Given the discussion of how they create their own future, is it yet possible for Quinn to avoid that fate? If so, will that unravel this timeline?

• Gary and Avocato kinda rushed Little Cato out of the black hole without ever really getting his approval that he wanted to return to them. And he doesn’t have any lines in the rest of the episode. Does he hate them now? Does he want to return to Ash and Invictus? Will he flee both, and just step out on his own with somebody, anybody else?

• How did Lord Commander and the zombies know where and when Gary and Avocato needed them? Were they attacking Invictus anyway by coincidence, or did they hear Quinn’s call for help?

• Is Mooncake dead? Is Lord Commander?

Ratings

I evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.

The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; a low rating may reflect low quality, but it may also reflect a deliberate choice. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.

Story: 8/10. An impressive amount of plot for a 21-minute episode, and most of it was of good quality. In the A plot, you had the emotional story of Avocato and Little Cato, set against the backdrop of Ash’s attempt to release Invictus. In the B plot, you had Quinn trying to reactivate the intergalactic bridge, set against her own emotional story of whatever precisely her misgivings are about Nightfall. Then there was a sprinkling of the overarching “we have to escape Final Space” plot (whatever that meant); Mooncake’s self-sacrifice; H.U.E. getting his (presumably) first body; and whatever the heck was going on with Lord Commander.

The last few storylines received only the briefest of attention, but fit organically with the rest of the story being told. This was, in some ways, the best kind of plot: chock-full of actual events taking place, but driven by interactions between characters.

Writing: 6/10. There wasn’t too much special about the dialogue. I’m ranking it slightly higher than average because it made an effort to change up the standard phrasing in most circumstances: Avocato and Gary’s declarations of love for Little Cato, for example, weren’t word-for-word what I’ve heard in 1,090 other television shows. Avocato’s description of how he adopted Cato was a remarkably efficient way of getting a nearly-complete backstory across in the fewest words possible.

I also particularly liked the dialogue given to Ash, which gave voice and purpose and depth to her raw fury.

There were a couple of clunkers. Gary’s “we’re going to die anyway” declaration of love for Quinn made me groan a bit; it was probably more cathartic for longtime fans, but viewed in isolation it was just a cliche played straight. And the attempt to convince Quinn to put on the helmet was a little bit too effective: “I don’t want to do this.” “If you do this, you’re choosing to do this.” “Okay!”

Production: 7/10. In most cases the voice acting was very effective, especially from Ash and Mooncake (yes, Mooncake!). The only real exception was Bizkit, who seemed to be doing a silly voice from a completely different television show.

The background music was also effective, driving drama and tension and pathos exactly where it needed to do so. The editing was fine, with one or two questionable scene transitions, particularly surrounding Invictus.

The color palette was very effective: muted ominous purples for Invictus’s lair, starkly contrasting bright colors among the heroes. Beyond that, the animation is standard quality for the last decade.

Characterization: 5/10. It’s really hard assigning this rating sometimes, and I agonized over this one quite a bit - in both directions. Twenty minutes is nowhere near enough to learn the personalities of a dozen characters I’ve never met before, so I have to try to detect layered meanings and draw out meaning from the tiniest clues.

What speaks strongly in favor of this finale is the fact that it wasn’t merely a giant climactic space battle, but rather character-driven interactions between different people who wanted different things. There’s clearly a lot going on with Ash: that moment of hesitation during Gary’s apology spoke volumes, and she has an interesting tendency to allow what’s right in front of her to distract her from her ultimate goals.

But on the other hand, the leads (Gary, Quinn, and Avocato) are fairly generic7, and gave few indications of depth or three-dimensionality.

Accessibility: 7/10. The distinctive character designs helped me tell them apart much better than on most animated shows, and their penchant for using each other’s names was very convenient. While I’m clearly missing a lot on the subject of character motivations, the plots themselves were easy to grasp. I’ve still got a lot of questions (the biggest of which is: what’s with the yellow lightning bolts on everybody’s necks?) but only once did I truly feel confused.

Closure: 3/10. Ouch. Dear God. I can see why the subreddit is so broken up about the show ending (well, most fan subreddits are, but this one’s shone through particularly strongly when I searched it for legal sources for watching the episode). Never getting to know Mooncake’s fate, or what happens to Quinn to turn her into Nightfall, or what happens after Invictus escapes his black hole prison and tears apart the cosmos?

Yes, there’s some closure here: I assume, based on the title, that the characters’ escape from “Final Space” is the end of an arc that goes back to Season 1 Episode 1. But damn, that was one hell of a cliffhanger to hit the fans with at the very end.

I hear there’s a graphic novel continuation, at least.

Do I want to watch the series now?

I’m not entirely sure that it’s for me - the generic characters are a bit worrying - but I’m willing to give it a try. In particular some of my kids would probably like it a great deal, and I’ll be happy to watch it with them.

EdwinSorrow on our Discord server

What do I know about this series going into it?

It’s a geeky sitcom by one of my favorite directors, Edgar Wright. I have actively wanted to watch it for some time, but when it got requested I had to put it aside. That’s extremely rare; I can count on one hand the number of times it has happened.

I know it has Wright’s frequent collaborators Simon Pegg and Jessica S-(something) in it, and that Pegg later joked that he was cast as Scotty in the J. J. Abrams Star Trek films as revenge for his character saying that odd-numbered Trek films always suck.

Recap

The opening credits are a montage of shots showing the living room of what looks like student or young-adult housing. Various characters fade in and out of existence, all watching television.

Daisy1 kicks things off with a voiceover: “The 21st-century family is made up of friends, not relatives.” The soundtrack, however, blares a DUN DUN DUN of disagreement, as we see Simon Pegg and (I assume) Daisy looking in horror at a For Sale sign outside their apartment building.

They enter their apartment building to find an estate agent showing a couple around. “Mrs. Klein,” says the agent, gave him the key. What makes Daisy and Simon (character name Tim) even more frustrated is that the couple are 25 and 24 years old - “Younger than us!” Daisy laments.

They decide they need to take action and head to another apartment down the hall, inside which they hear loud, hysterical sobbing. “Brian, are you all right?” they ask - but Brian isn’t crying, he’s listening to a recording of sobs, to help him externalize his feelings. The cause of the heartbreak: “She” has gone to Manchester. “Marsha?” asks Tim. “No, Twist has gone to Manchester.”

I recall having seen the name Twist in the opening credits, which is odd. I know Edgar Wright used to have a penchant for giving characters the same name as the actors, so this may be a case of that.

There’s a cutaway to a woman dancing at a bar and trying to call Daisy to let her know she’s in Manchester. So my guess is Marsha is Brian’s girlfriend, but Twist is his roommate and he is non-romantically broken up about her moving out.

After the cutaway, Brian laments how everything in life is uncertain. But this house - this house - is the one thing he can rely on: my port in a storm, my rock. Tim and Daisy glance at each other, worried, at this extended display of verbal irony.

They leave Brian’s apartment, possibly without giving him the bad news, and discuss their options. “We’ve got to find Marsha,” says Tim. “Say we’re sorry we hurt her and please, please, please don’t sell the house.”

So Marsha is Mrs. Klein, the owner of the house, and Brian’s girlfriend? Weird.

Tim and Daisy then go to another guy’s apartment, whose name I didn’t catch (Mike, maybe?). Together they conclude that Marsha must have contacted “Amber”. Cut to an external shot of Amber’s house; we don’t see her, but she clearly thinks her mother Marsha is a psychopath.

But where does Amber live? To get the address out, Tim and maybe-Mike and Daisy break into Marsha’s room. But just as they’re about to leave, Daisy looks out the window and spots a dog, named Colin, running off into the neighbors’ yard. She freaks out. “When did you start giving a shit?” Tim asks. Daisy is insulted and storms off.

Good job, Tim - now you’re going to lose your house and your girlfriend.

While Tim and Mike and Brian head off to find Marsha, Daisy knocks on the neighbors’ door. It has a prominent number 47 on it, in a clear Star Trek reference. But there’s no answer, and the door is slightly open. With trepidation, she enters, seeing pictures of Colin all over the walls, and a boiling pot on the stove in the kitchen. She reaches out a trembling hand, fearing the machinations of a young Glenn Close…

Meanwhile, Tim has found Marsha and quotes the line from the episode’s opening: The 21st-century family is made up of friends, not relatives. “And if that’s true, you’re the best auntie I’ve ever had.” Marsha leans in and they start to kiss, and Tim emerges from the imagine spot, having freaked himself out. They’re still in the van, and haven’t even started driving yet.

Inside the pot, Daisy finds… a teddy bear. Just in time, the old lady who lives here enters the kitchen; she was boiling the teddy bear to clean it. Colin is perfectly fine, and the old lady sweetly invites her to have tea with her, drop in any time, or even contact her anytime she needs a dogsitter. She’s being very sweet about it - but the background music and lighting turn it into something inordinately creepy.

Returning home, Daisy turns to Colin in desperation. “Why?” she asks. “Have I done something wrong? I don’t neglect you. I can change!” Creepy music plays, and Daisy’s pleas are intercut with flashbacks to her ignoring Colin or pushing him away, while the old lady treats him much better. Daisy’s pleas amount to nothing, however, and Colin gets up and leaves the apartment.

Meanwhile, the boys have found Marsha. “How did you find me?” she demands. Tim dodges the question, but Mike is a little bit too open:

“You’re wasting my time, I’ve made up my mind,” she insists.

“But we only did it” - whatever the original insult that drove her off was - “because we love living there,” says Tim. And he gives the “friends and not relatives” line.

And just as he had imagined: she leans in; he thinks she’s about to kiss him; he leans in too; and she spits out a venomous “Kiss my arse.”

That evening, a depressed Tim and Mike return home to find a depressed Daisy. They update one another on their failed missions, and Daisy laments: “Everyone leaves.”

“Don’t be silly,” says Tim as he goes to answer a knock at the door. It’s a friend of his named Sophie2; she’s moving to Seattle to work for Marvel Comics. “Never mind, Daisy, you were right.”

He agrees to go with her to the airport the next morning, and asks “What are you planning to do for the next 13 hours?” She gives him a look.

So huh. Clearly he has a sexual relationship with Sophie; up until now I thought Daisy was his girlfriend.

With Tim now… ahem… busy, and Daisy out of it, Mike has an idea. Wearing military fatigues, he approaches a quartet of similarly-clad friends at a bar. He calls them “boys”; they call him “Sarge”3.

The next morning, Daisy gets the train schedule for a place called “Colwyn Bay”, packs up her stuff, and heads out, pausing only long enough to leave a note for Tim.

Then there’s a knock on the door, and Tim and Sophie wake up. It’s Mike, still in fatigues. He orders Tim to get dressed, then heads down the hall to Brian’s room.

Brian is listening to the sobbing tape and unable to answer the call to action, but Mike is prepared: he puts a cassette with the Thunderbirds theme into the player, which instantly rouses Brian to action.

We next see Mike opening a garage door, accompanied by his subordinates4. They express some hesitation: “Is this a matter for the military?” But Mike smacks some sense into him: of course it is!

Cut to Marsha, looking out a window as a tank rolls up the street towards her. The clowns (by which I mean the main characters) pop out. “What are you gonna do, blow me up?” she asks.

But the four soldiers, like a well-oiled machine, jump out and hold a banner that reads “We’re sorry Martha”; Mike waves a white flag; and Tim holds up a boombox blasting a song with the lyrics “I want you back for good”. She is visibly touched.

Meanwhile, next door, the old lady has renamed Colin “Lancelot”.

At 11am, Tim, Mike, and Brian return to the apartment and find Colin waiting for them (why?) and Daisy’s letter, which he had missed in Mike’s urgency. The letter is long-winded but boils down to Daisy saying, “By the time you read this I’ll be gone.”

What can I do? Tim agonizes. Sophie’s not answering her phone so he can’t explain; the tube is on strike; and they have no money for a cab. How is he going to get to the train station to stop Daisy, and then get to Sophie in time to take her to the airport?

Mike comes up with another idea, and we next see Tim driving down the train platform on something that looks kind of like a flattened Zamboni; I assume this is a callback to some earlier episode. While in the meantime Mike has taken his van to Sophie’s, handing her a letter from Tim explaining why he’s late (though Tim runs up mere moments later).

In a montage, Brian locates Twist in Manchester5; Mike is seen teaching Martha how to put together a rifle blindfolded; Tim and Daisy sit in their living room watching TV; and workers take down the For Sale sign.

Lingering questions

• Does Brian successfully convince Twist to come back?

• Does Tim and Sophie’s relationship survive being long-distance?

• Why did Colin return?

Ratings

I evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.

The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; a low rating may reflect low quality, but it may also reflect a deliberate choice. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.

Story: 6/10. A well-executed example of the classic sitcom format, where each of the five main characters has their own plot thread, woven nicely together into a strong plot rope. The simplicity of the story and a few weird plot holes (like issues with the timeline, and Colin’s sudden reappearance) prevent it from reaching excellence, but it’s a good showcase of what can be done in a mere 25 minutes.

Writing: 6/10. There was far too much reliance on verbal irony. The first the-universe-will-predictably-conspire-to-prove-this-character-wrong gag is great; the fourth is pushing it. The rest of the episode was genuinely funny at times, but not as often as I would have liked.

I want to also single out enormous praise for the episode’s theme, which is the best depiction of the five so-called stages of grief that I’ve ever seen on television. Contrary to how they are usually portrayed, the original model6 is of five different reactions to impending loss, not five stages a person goes through after a loss has already taken place. Some people go through all five reactions in the classic order, but many have only one or two.

This episode doesn’t match the model perfectly, but it’s far closer to the original intent than the cliches you see elsewhere on television. Each character is presented with a different type of loss, some more absurd than others, and reacts to it in their own idiosyncratic way:

• Tim’s girlfriend is leaving for career reasons that have nothing to do with their relationship. He reacts with immediate acceptance.

• Daisy’s dog has decided that he loves the next-door neighbor more than he loves her. She reacts with bargaining, then moves on to despair when this fails.

• Brian is dealing with a loss that has already taken place: Twist having left for Manchester7. In a twisted form of denial (denying his own feelings more than the fact of the loss), he externalizes his reaction to someone sobbing on a tape recorder.

• Marsha is dealing with the loss of the good relationship she had with her tenants, due to whatever horrible thing they did to her in the previous episode. She reacts with anger, which causes even more loss (the loss of the tenants themselves, due to selling the house), which causes even more anger.

Which leaves Mike, the only one not wallowing in a psychology textbook, to actually step up to the plate and do something about it.

Production: 8/10. This is still early in Edgar Wright’s career, but you can see here everything that will one day make him great. Wherever the writing is lacking, he more than makes up for with perfect lighting, music, and instructions to the actors.

On the page, there is nothing creepy whatsoever about the nice old lady who is perfectly willing to watch your dog for you - but he knows exactly how to turn it from sweet to sinister without changing a line of dialog. But the best part is that he doesn’t make her actually sinister at all. He makes her seem sinister only to Daisy; we the viewers get to see her through Daisy’s eyes while simultaneously being fully aware that Daisy is overreacting and she really is just a sweet old lady.

Characterization: 3/10. This episode didn’t provide much of a glimpse into the characters at all. I saw Marsha while she was angry, but everybody gets angry; I saw Daisy while she was depressed, but everybody gets depressed. The little bit I did see of Brian and Mike’s personalities was more confusing than enlightening. I couldn’t tell you a thing about who any of these people are.

Accessibility: 5/10. While I got the basic plot and the characters’ names fairly quickly, the nature of their relationships still eludes me. Daisy and Tim act just like they’re dating, and I was certain they were up until the moment Sophie showed up. Marsha is their landlord, and yet somehow they act like she’s a close-knit member of the friend group. And I don’t even know what to think about Mike being in the military.

Most confusing at all, Twist is Brian’s girlfriend, but left him because she wants to experience the gay scene in Manchester - but of gay men rather than gay women. So she just likes hanging around gay men? Does that mean Brian is gay, and she’s not his girlfriend? Then why is he so broken up about it? How exactly does that relationship work?

Closure: 5/10. Many a finale features the characters facing permanent breakup but averting it at the last minute. This one is slightly atypical in that Sophie actually does leave, and the situation with Twist and Brian is still up in the air (did he go to Manchester to bring her back, or stay there with her?), but other than those minor twists it’s a classic way to close out a series.

Do I want to watch the series now?

I always did want to watch it, and that hasn’t changed. I’m a big fan of Edgar Wright; even though I don’t like everything he does, this is a perfectly good example of his early work. I’m looking forward to seeing the whole thing.

Hattakiri on Reddit

What do I know about this series going into it?

It’s part of a franchise called “Love Live”. I’ve heard of neither the show nor the franchise.

Recap

Zoom in slowly on a Japanese painting, then towards a mountain in that painting that becomes real. “The world was full of heart,” says a narrator. “Everyone’s Resonances [capital R] resonated together and filled the world with song. But then the world started to deteriorate, and the screams of the earth ripped apart the sky and the sky ripped apart the mountains.”

This deterioration comes in the form of an Eye of Sauron with red spikes coming out of the pupil and zig-zagging purple tree-root tendrils descending to the ground in a dome. In a rapid-fire montage, we see the citizens of the town of “Numazu” reacting to its appearance and discussion of evacuation procedures.

But where are they planning to evacuate to, if the entire world is falling apart?

As the montage continues, some of the characters - none of whose names I know yet - refer to Numazu as a city, not a town. That’s three different tiers of apocalypse in as many minutes; I think the subtitles may be flawed.

In what looks like a train station, a teenage girl asks a bunch of younger children to hand out supplies to the people who need them. There aren’t that many supplies - she clearly could have handed out everything herself - but perhaps she’s keeping the kids occupied and helping them feel important and responsible. Another teenager approaches her and they wonder, “Where is Tonosama?”

Cut to a lighthouse at the docks, and to Tonosama - whom I did not expect to be an enormous metal frog. Tonosama is showing signs of severe malfunction, and the girl in the blue dress whom he has befriended is concerned. She doesn’t know if it’s the apocalypse causing the malfunction, but she’ll have to take over doing (whatever-it-is) without his help.

Meanwhile, in a library, a woman collapses. “You’re pushing yourself too hard!” says her friend. “Father,” the first woman laments, “I may not be able to complete my task,” as strange jellyfish fly around her.

Well, this is a thoroughly confusing start: I’ve got no idea what’s going on and have learned a total of one character name. We’re off!

Luckily, the next scene gives me a bit more to work with. A young girl named “zura” (yes, in lowercase) asks a woman if they’ll ever be able to play outside again. The woman reassures her, but doesn’t quite believe it herself. “Yohane-san,” she says to herself, worried, as she stares out the window.

In a high-tech control room, a man reports that they’ve found Yohane-san. But before they can do anything about it, there is an all-caps EMERGENCY alert. Reports come flying in: the power’s out, they’re working off the emergency generator, and animals (I saw red-eyed deer earlier, so maybe the catastrophe is turning these animals evil?) have begun to enter the building. The Chief, a woman with a monocle, goes nearly catatonic: “It’s all over.” But her assistant shakes her out of it. There’s still hope! We’ve found Yohane-san!

Yohane is on the beach, with her pet wolf and her bear1-headed magic staff. She uses the staff to contact everyone in the town telepathically. “I have to sing!” she tells them. “Even if I didn’t want to, I remember now the reason that I sing! I want to use my song to protect everyone, and this town! Girls, I need you by my side!”

A bunch of girls rush up to her on the beach and one by one pledge their support: “Everyone’s Resonances with your magic will reach everyone” - whatever that means - “because we’re all-” dramatic pause for effect “-friends!”

Thus encouraged, Yohane’s boots glow and create a sigil on the ground around her. And she begins singing, extremely nasally.

An energy beam emerges from her staff and launches upward into the Eye of Sauron. And suddenly she and all of her friends are standing on a floating platform inside the red sea of evil. An extended musical sequence begins, and thankfully the other voice actors are much better singers. The song is not, unfortunately, translated, but I catch the word “harmony” in English. Rainbows and physical musical notes and flying dolphins abound!

But suddenly lightning strikes the platform and the Eye of Sauron spits out more purple stuff. They collapse onto the beach again and can barely stand. “Where’s Yohane?” they ask. Over there, trapped inside that floating hamster ball, unconscious.

Yohane’s spirit, however, wakes up in an endless expanse of water. She hears somebody whisper “Yohane…”2, followed by all of her friends outside shouting her name. However, it isn’t until her wolf calls out to her that her bear staff glows and she wakes up in real life. She continues singing the song from before, as do the others, and this time the song can be heard by everybody in the town; one of townsfolk comments that he can hear “the chef’s voice”.

The evil animals lose their red eyes and return to normal. The Eye of Sauron vanishes, as does the dome of evil purple tree roots. And, most importantly, the giant robot frog returns to operation.

Denouement:

• The Chief’s assistants bring her their plans for the town’s recovery.

• There is a lot of mail coming into the town now that it’s been reunited with the outside world. Although they have an… unorthodox delivery system.

  

• A baker has reopened her shop.

• “Riko-chan” pets a deer, which is a good way to catch Lyme disease.

• The frog-robot Tonosama tosses a drill to his owner, who is the town’s mechanic and (I assume) his builder.

• At an outdoor school, a schoolteacher explains to the kids that the world maintained its balance through song, and that something bad happened when people forgot about singing. “What should we do?” the kids ask nervously. “Bring our hearts together and sing,” she explains. “Everyone’s Resonances enveloped the town and the balance was restored.”

  I don’t understand. Why do the kids need to be taught this? Didn’t they just live through it a few days ago? Have we timeskipped?

• A girl stands on a stage before a trio of judges for an audition. The judges aren’t paying attention to her, instead discussing amongst themselves “some girl” - I assume Yohane - whom they were very excited about but who rejected them.

Finally we go to Yohane, who has decided to stay in this town, even though she’s not auditioning. Because what’s really important is what’s inside her. The only reason she wanted to go to “Tokai” was because of her frustration at what happened the last time she was there. But she wants to stay here and do fun things with everyone precious to her.

I don’t understand any of that. Isn’t she abdicating her responsibility to keep the rest of the world equally safe from the Eye of Sauron? What’s special about this town? And why doesn’t “doing fun things with everyone precious to her” include auditioning for a play she wants to be in?

At least she finally reveals that “Lailaps” (whom she had mentioned several times so far, but I didn’t note it) is the name of her wolf.

After the closing credits, Yohane tells us that everything in this world - happiness, sadness, anger, screams - is all a song. And all of her friends are gathered around her, telling her they want to sing again.

I’m confused as to why this scene is here. Wasn’t the whole episode about her deciding to sing again? Why are they going through this again?

To close out the episode, Yohane exclaims, “I’m going to live through today!” - a hint that earlier episodes may have contained a much darker plotline than this one.

Lingering questions

• How does the apocalypse work? Is it worldwide or localized? Are there other towns and cities that have forgotten how to sing and that Yohane needs to save?

Ratings

I evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.

The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; a low rating may reflect low quality, but it may also reflect a deliberate choice. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.

Story: 2/10. A very simple, even cliche plot about the world being saved through the power of song. The storyline is vibes-based rather than logical: They have to sing to fight the Eye of Sauron; they sing and are defeated; they sing again and are victorious. There was little or no indication that they were singing any stronger the second time around, or that the Eye of Sauron was somehow weaker.

Nor was it really clear whether the Eye of Sauron is a sentient opponent or a natural phenomenon. The opening narration strongly implied the latter - but if that’s the case, was the lightning strike that defeated the girls’ first attempt to sing just a coincidence?

Outside of the montage in the denouement, which consisted of the briefest of updates on what various characters were up to now that the apocalypse has been averted, the episode had no subplots. The closest thing to a subplot was the people in the control room looking for and finally finding Yohane - but that proved pointless, as before they could actually do anything with that information she announced herself to the entire town through telepathy anyway.

Writing: 3/10. Weak writing. Some of it is probably due to the bad translation (which goes under Production below). But the dialogue throughout the episode could have been written by a bot, especially the very silly sequence of friends announcing their intent to help. And the post-credits scene was just a rehash of what we’d already seen in the episode.

The best moment by far is the one where the teenager keeps the kids busy by asking them to distribute goods she could easily have given out herself - and I suspect I’m reading into that scene an interpretation that wasn’t intended.

Production: 5/10. Typical voice acting and animation quality; the CG camera movement during the dance sequence were nicely done but not groundbreaking. The lead voice actress isn’t a great singer but most of the others were.

I’m choosing to put the biggest inconsistency under Production rather than Writing because I have trouble imagining it was present in the original Japanese. The opening narration clearly described the entire world falling apart for lack of song, but from the moment that narration ended it was equally clear the destruction is localized and limited. Between that and the characters referring to Numazu as a town one moment and a city the next, I suspect this wasn’t a problem with the writing but rather the translation.

Furthermore, given how central the singing is to the plot, not translating it is a crime.

Characterization: 2/10. Other than Yohane’s brief depression and the Chief’s brief catatonia, nobody was on screen long enough to get any sense of their personality.

Accessibility: 2/10. While the basic plot is very easy to grasp - sing to save the world - most of the episode whooshed past my head too quickly. By the end I could only place three names to faces (four if “Chief” counts as a name), and I still don’t know the setting.

Who is Yohane? An immortal itinerant troubadour tasked with saving the world? Who is the Chief? The mayor of a small town with a penchant for abusing its budget to build high-tech underground bunkers to serve as mission control in crises?

Who are the girls and why is their singing more useful to Yohane than that of other townsfolk? Why did the town stop singing, and why wasn’t the mere appearance of the Eye of Sauron sufficiently scary to realize it was important to resume? Is the Eye of Sauron a malevolent being or a natural phenomenon?

I understood the basic plot, and yet I feel like I didn’t understand anything at all.

Closure: 6/10. I’m not really sure. The apocalypse has been averted, so I’ll give it slightly high marks. But I don’t trust this ending much. Who says it isn’t happening in another town somewhere else in the world? Is that possible? Can it spread to the rest of the planet from there? What was all that about Yohane and her audition and moving out of this town?

Do I want to watch the series now?

No. It’s very much not a genre I enjoy, and it’s not the best executed example of that genre either.

chloe-and-timmy on Reddit

What do I know about this series going into it?

I watched Star Trek religiously as a teenager, and retain an encyclopedic knowledge of everything from TOS through Star Trek: Insurrection. I saw the first two and a half episodes of Discovery before dropping it in disgust1; saw the three Abrams movies; and have previously done the finale of Prodigy for this Substack.

Though I no longer watch Star Trek myself, I do still watch every one of SF Debris’s reviews, so I have a basic familiarity with how the characters in Lower Decks behaved in the early seasons.

Oh, and I watched - and loved - “Those Old Scientists”, the crossover episode with Strange New Worlds. Technically that’s not a Lower Decks episode, so the latter’s finale is still (barely) eligible for this Substack.

Previously On

A quantum fissure. Boimler saw a parallel version of himself that’s much cooler. Tendi is worried that T’Lyn is competing with her. The dimensional rifts are not natural: Somebody’s creating them. Harry Kim is evil?! All the energy needs to be redirected into one universe: ours. But that will destroy it. The duplicate Boimler sends a warning message to Boimler Prime. He’ll know what to do, if he doesn’t freak out.

Recap

A Klingon named Relga2 is patrolling a boring part at the edge of the Klingon empire, where there are no enemies to be found. She’s furious: I’m being sidelined by the High Council because my brothers were murdered!

Suddenly a rift in space opens, and energy blasts start shooting out of it in all directions. A “soliton wave” hits one of the Birds of Prey, and the Klingons inside it start transforming - but we don’t really see into what before the ship explodes.

Rather than being even more pissed off that she lost a ship, Relga is evilly pleased. “This is exactly what I needed!”

The opening credits feature the Cerritos flying away from exciting things like battles with the Borg, and instead getting involved in silly misadventures like a giant bug attaching itself to the ship3.

The episode proper begins with the Lower Decks crew relaxing in the mess hall… sort of. Rutherford is trying to fix some piece of the ship, but he’s frustrated because his implant can’t interface with it; the Cerritos is “too old”. (Odd; did he get his regular implant replaced with one from the future?) Meanwhile, Boimler is reading up on his cooler alternate-dimension self’s life history, using it as a model for making decisions in his own life, everything down to growing a beard and what he wants to drink.

Suddenly he receives the message that we saw being sent in the Previously, and runs out of the mess hall freaking out: “We’re all gonna die!”

Some time later, after he calms down, they approach the captain (Mariner’s mother). Against their expectations4, she immediately trusts and believes their story: something about T’Pol and Harry Kim being interdimensional overlords.

Meanwhile, on a Klingon freighter delivering blood wine...

Suddenly, Relga’s Bird of Prey decloaks in front of them. “You destroyed one of my ships!” she accuses Ma’ah, the freighter captain5. This he clearly didn’t do, but Ma’ah knows what’s going on: Relga wants to take revenge on him for something he did years ago, a revenge that for some reason has been denied her, so she’s pinning the ship’s destruction on him as a pretext. “Relga has no honor”, says Ma’ah, and evades the attack - but when he tries to ram Relga’s bridge, his copilot Malor declares “Today is not a good day to die!”, swerves away, and forces it to flee.

Back on the Cerritos, they consult with Starfleet: they can seal the rift by firing some sort of beam into it, but there’s a problem: they can’t get close enough. The rift is surrounded by a Schrodinger Possibility Field that transforms anything that enters it into an alternate version of itself, which is what was happening to the Klingons before they blew up.

Oh, and why does the Cerritos need to handle this, as opposed to the Enterprise?

Fortunately, Starfleet has prepared shield modifications that will prevent the field from affecting them. Unfortunately, Starfleet got the calculations slightly off; when they install it, they find that the material in the ship’s hull won’t be protected. They won’t transform into other versions of themselves, but the ship will.

And so they’re off to save the universe! …as soon as they deal with another little problem. The freighter shows up, and Ma’ah and Malor (who know Mariner) ask for asylum. Captain Freeman grants it, but no sooner are the two aboard then Relga shows up. “Hand them over!” she demands, but Freeman refuses - and tries in vain to explain that they have no time for this.

While Freeman and Relga are arguing, though, Admiral Freeman (her husband, and Mariner’s father) calls up. “Hand them over to Captain Relga,” he orders - though nobody seems to notice that the message is a little bit glitchy and weird.

What’s interesting at this point is that there are two independent clocks ticking down. There’s the in-universe clock of how long they have until the rift destroys all of reality, but there’s also the out-of-universe clock of the episode itself. I’m deliberately not checking how much time is left, but I don’t know how they’re going to resolve the Klingon plot without turning the universe-destroying plot into an afterthought.

Either that or they’re planning on having the rift actually destroy the universe in the final episode. Which would frankly fit the tone of the episode so far, but presumably also cause serious continuity problems with the concurrently running series in the franchise.

Following the Admiral’s orders, Captain Freeman orders Ma’ah and Malor to be brought to the bridge. But only Ma’ah shows up; Malor seems to have vanished. Suddenly one of the Klingon bird of prey blows up (I glanced away and didn’t see how), and the firefight breaks out. But the Cerritos really doesn’t have time for this, so they don’t stick around to duke it out: they go to warp and head straight to the rift.

When they enter the Possibility Field, the shield modifications work as described: the crew is unaffected, but the Cerritos itself changes into a Freedom-class starship6. Then the Klingon ships enter the field behind them - and one of them changes into a sailing barge that is clearly not suited for space travel. Everyone on board instantly dies. “Uh-oh,” the Cerritos crew worry. “What if that happens to us?”

As the ship changes shape again, they do what they can to stabilize the systems, but it’s difficult going. Tendi and her Vulcan competitor/friend (whose name I’ve forgotten) argue over how best to proceed, while Rutherford is getting more and pissed off that his implant isn’t interfacing with the ship properly.

Mariner brings Ma’ah into the dolphin navigation room7, where Boimler is hosing down a dolphin to help it access the controls.

They’re still looking for Malor, whom Ma’ah considers a coward. Boimler checks his alternate-dimension self’s PADD for advice, and Ma’ah grabs it from him: this clearly has Malor’s location in it!

Meanwhile, the Cerritos changes into a mirror-universe Terran Empire ship. “We have awesome weapons!” exclaims the combat-hungry tactical officer. But he never gets to use them, as the Klingons’ next salvo disables them.

The whole time, Relga is gloating: Thank you for sending me the shield modifications! (Freeman had sent them to her earlier, while trying to convince her that the rift was a more pressing problem, but this show is so quick I didn’t have time to note it.) And why isn’t her hull changing the way the Cerritos is? Because Klingons never update their ship designs; all Birds of Prey look the same.

Ma’ah confronts Freeman on the bridge: This PADD has Malor’s location in it! You must order Boimler to unlock it! Boimler agrees - but then shatters the PADD instead.

I don’t get it. The PADD really did have the information in it? Why? How could Alternate Boimler have been in anywhere near a situation similar to this one?

Ma’ah and Freeman are both about to explode, but Ransom steps forward and admits: I hid Malor, because I didn’t trust the message from Admiral Freeman. They replay it, and analysis reveals that it was faked by Relga.

With that, Freeman decides to stop playing around. And we next see two crewmen I don’t recognize, standing on the Cerritos’s hull. One of them has the ability to create an energy ball with her hands(?), and throws it at Relga’s ship, which brings its shields down. The next wave that hits Relga doesn’t affect her ship itself, as established, but the people inside all turn into mindless proto-Klingons who fight among themselves until the ship finally blows itself up in disgust.

The next wave that hits the Cerritos not only turns it into a Sovereign-class ship, but also repairs all of its systems. And as they approach the rift the changes happen more and more often (it even becomes Galaxy-class at one point) until finally one of the probability waves changes it back to normal.

That’s when Rutherford realizes: the California-class is specially designed to be reconfigured more easily than any other ship, and that’s why I love it so much! The interfacing problems he’s been having aren’t with the Cerritos, they’re with his implant! He tears out his implant, dives into a console, and does some quick engineering to port the rift’s energies directly into the engines, ending the probability waves’ effect on them.

But there’s an unintended side effect: the ship duplicates into two identical Cerritos...es.

I’ll be honest, I don’t get this part - something about each ship’s systems controlling the other, which leads to a silly revelation between the Tendis and the the Vulcans that they can work together and merge the two into one Cerritos again.

Finally they reach the rift and fire the gluonic beam at it. It’s not working! The rift is still open! We’re too late!

Suddenly Ma’ah announces, “On my farm, you can’t stop a river, but you can build a dam!”

Mariner realizes he’s right, whatever that means. She presses a button and changes how the beam works: rather than closing the rift, she redirects and contains the energy so that it sustains the rift in place. It’s now permanently open but not expanding.

The denouement, and Boimler’s log: What remains of Relga’s fleet has been handed over to Ma’ah. The permanent rift that leads to parallel universes is now a new frontier for Starfleet8. They’ve stationed Starbase 80 outside the rift (which is significant for… some reason) and the Cerritos - no, sorry, I misunderstood, Captain Freeman - will be supervising those missions. She goes around giving everyone hugs, and they greet the arriving Admiral Freeman, who will be running the operation with her.

Rutherford, Tendi, the Vulcan, and Mariner meet in the mess hall. He doesn’t have the implant anymore; if he has to choose between it and the Cerritos, he chooses the Cerritos.

They ask Mariner: why aren’t you mad that your mother is no longer the captain? “Because that doesn’t matter.” The ship’s crew is what’s amazing about it, she explains, as we see a heartwarming montage of characters who had appeared earlier in the series (some of whom I recognize from the SF Debris reviews) and what they’re up to right now.

Then she reveals that she was angry and had set her bed on fire. But that’s all behind her! Probably.

With Freeman now running interdimensional operations, First Officer Ransom has been promoted to captain. And despite them still being extremely junior, Ransom picks Boimler and Mariner as joint provisional first officers (which they object to, as it’s not a thing), and says they can consider it a contest between them as to who will be promoted to first officer (which they object to, as it will ruin their friendship).

So with the new command structure sorted out, the only thing left is for Ransom to pick a cool phrase to say when they go to warp. “Engage the core!” he decides, a nod to his enthusiasm for working out. Boimler and Mariner freak out about that more than his other decisions: Don’t make us suffer through that joke every day for the next n years!

He doesn’t care. Engage the core!

Lingering questions

• When Alternate Boimler sent the message to Boimler Prime, why didn’t he give him the shield modifications and gluonic beam instructions along with it?

• Did Boimler’s PADD really say where Malor was hidden? All he mentioned was unnamed Klingons seeking asylum, which could be anybody for any reason. Since this scenario explicitly came about because of the rift, how could anything like it have happened in another universe? (Indeed we later find out that it didn’t happen the same way.)

• Who will become First Officer?

Ratings

I evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.

The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; a low rating may reflect low quality, but it may also reflect a deliberate choice. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.

Story: 7/10. I was continually surprised and resurprised at just how much they fit in this episode. It was less than 25 minutes long, yet had an A plot and a B plot (interwoven very nicely together!) plus at least four different character subplots, depending on how you count.

Now, it’s a bit less impressive than it sounds, because it felt like the episode was being played at 1.5x speed9. Everyone spoke extremely quickly, much faster than I can type (which is saying a lot). But it’s still pretty impressive.

I do have a few complaints that keep the score at merely “great” rather than “exceptional”. The resolution of the Tendi and T’Lyn conflict relied on an extremely silly technobabble problem that was nonsensically introduced and then nonsensically solved in the span of 30 seconds. And part of the main plot requires that either a random Klingon knows how to spoof Starfleet’s most secure message encryption, or that Starfleet Command routinely sends orders to its vessels over completely open channels.

Don’t let my nitpicks overshadow the praise, though. The writers took great care to set up the Klingon plot so that it impacted the rift plot in ways that made perfect sense: They state well in advance that Relga is patrolling the Klingon border with the Federation; they set up a logical reason for Freeman to send Relga the shield modifications; and they establish good reasons, grounded in Star Trek lore, that the Klingon ships would be affected less than the Cerritos was.

Writing: 9/10. Genuinely funny, especially the “On my farm…” send-up of getting sudden inspiration from inane metaphors. No notes.

Production: 6/10. Good music, good acting, and good comedic timing by the editors. But the sped-up pacing genuinely bothered me. This wasn’t frenetic pacing; plenty of shows have that. This just felt like it was needlessly on fast-forward.

The animation was smooth, detailed, and impressive. There were moments during the external shots that I forgot I was watching an animated show (though in the days of CGI that line may be so blurry that it no longer exists).

I do wish, however, they had made more use of the “changing ship configurations” to redesign the corridors to reflect those of other continuities, such as TOS-era, Enterprise-era, Kelvin-continuity, maybe even throw in a couple that are Farscape or Babylon 5-style10 as a gag.

I also caught a continuity error: Just after the Bird of Prey turns into a sailing vessel, the cat-doctor is seen in the background on the bridge, then mere seconds later is seen treating a wounded crewmember on the other side of the ship, then is shown on the bridge again as if she never left.

Characterization: 6/10. This is probably unfair, but an unfortunate side effect of already knowing a lot about these characters is that I’m having trouble subtracting that knowledge to figure out what I knew (or could have known) from this episode alone. I know that Mariner and Boimler are complex and interesting people, because I’ve watched many scenes featuring them. How much of that could I have absorbed from this episode alone? I’m guesstimating slightly above average, but I’m very uncertain about it.

Accessibility: 3/10. The sped-up pacing and large number of characters would have had me completely lost without a thorough grounding in Star Trek in general and these characters in particular. Unlike the previous category, however, I can use the unfamiliar side characters as a proxy for how confused I would probably be about the rest of this episode. The answer is: a lot. I regularly mixed up Ma’ah and Malor and had to check my own notes to remember which was which (I’m sure one or two incorrect references have slipped through). I have no idea who Relga is or why she hates them so much. And I have no idea what was going on with Evil Harry Kim and Boimler’s duplicate in that alternate universe, or what T’Pol had anything to do with them.

Closure: 8/10. A lot of character arcs were wrapped up with a nice, neat bow, with a sprinkling of And the Adventure Continues to prevent the series from reaching 10/10 (which is, I emphasize, not necessarily a good or bad thing). Boimler and Mariner are now part of the command staff. Tendi and T’Lyn have resolved their… whatever-it-was. Rutherford has permanently removed what was until now a central part of his character.

And all that while saving the entire universe; ending what was probably a long-running Klingon subplot; and choosing a plot device that let the animators engage in a bit of ship-design fanservice that didn’t feel forced or oppressive.

Do I want to watch the series now?

I have never liked the works of Alex Kurtzman. I had given Discovery a fair try because I’d long been a Star Trek fan, but was always apprehensive about what he would do with the franchise. That apprehension proved justified. As a result I avoided watching anything else from the new era of Trek (with the exception of that one SNW episode). My disappointment in the finale of Prodigy only reinforced that belief.

At the same time, I’d heard good things about Lower Decks11. And this episode is certainly good enough to recommend it. So I’m willing to concede that I painted new Trek with too broad a brush, and I plan to start LD from the beginning.