There were a lot of things about this series I didn't really take to immediately, but as each season progressed, I accepted them because the story arc was developing interestingly enough, and I put my faith in that the producers and writers would thoroughly tie all loose ends together, and answering any remaining questions before the Series close. When I saw the final episode's total running time was the standard 45 minutes, however, that alone sent up an immediate red flag, and I started to suspect I was going to be disappointed. There was simply too much left to explain, and so much more that needed to happen - I couldn't see it all fitting into one 45 minute episode!! How will they ever do it!?
Needless to say, they didn't do it, and I WAS disappointed. Completely and thoroughly. Not so much by the fact that there was a lot left UNEXPLAINED, but because what little they did wrap up, was done shoddily, quickly and as totally anti-climactic as possible.
I expected to be made just a little nervous with some chance of danger and threat to the main characters, even knowing chances were pretty good the heroes would come out alive, victorious and more less no worse for wear. The show historically has stuck strictly to crowd pleasing, and so I could accept that there likely wouldn't be anything TOO surprising happening. I expected the standard fare AT LEAST, though; i.e. a big final battle (didn't happen), lots of satisfying scenes of the Espheni getting their lanky butts kicked (never saw a one of them in the whole episode). Apparently they decided the best element of surprise in the final episode would be to completely slough off on any quality of story, writing and even production value (!), and leave everyone in the audience who's invested their time in it for the past 5 seasons, completely unsatisfied. Wow, what a twist! Of the knife. In your back. For trusting professionals to deliver a quality piece of entertainment. This was so crappy, it made the final episode of Dexter look better, because just when you thought a Series Finale couldn't get worse than that... one did!
I could go on for pages, but to cut to the point, and illustrate only the sorest moments of a sorry excuse for a final episode to an otherwise decently conceived series, I'll point to these:
(1) No final battle. The entire last half of the last season was building and promising and raising expectations for this all out hell break between mankind and alien invaders that just never happened. The 2nd Mass and Co. more or less identified where the Espheni were holed up, sneak in the back door past a bunch of glowing (and unguarded???) Espheni eggs that never really hatched on them full scale (save for one soldier getting killed by one unseen flash of nothing substantial), even after the foreshadowing of Cochise (their Volm ally) advising they'd best not disturb them due to the hatch-lings extraordinarily violent behavior. What a figurative loaded gun that never gets fired!!
(2) The Queen alien is a big spider with a Walt Disney villain agenda, complete with cliché Evil Stepmother voice?!? Are you kidding me?? So... all this invasion was because some cavemen killed her spider daughter thousands of years ago the first time they tried to invade. Was it Bring Your Kids To Work Day in the writers room when the final episode was being written? Did they all let their middle school children have Carte Blanche with the storyline? What the hell just HAPPENED to this show!?!??!!?
(3) Pope comes back, just to die in front of Tom. Huh. Okay... So out of nowhere John Pope - who, mind you, throughout the entire series has had this on and off, good guy/bad guy thing going on, and who up until this point, the character development and conflict of personality between he and Tom Mason was really dynamic and frequently very volatile - he just shows up again at the end after we all thought he'd been killed off (but we really didn't), not to have a final confrontation with Tom - or even, maybe, a setting aside of differences, or one saving the other from peril, and a friendship or at least better understanding is made between the two, as the battle for a mankind wanes, symbolizing the future of a new humanity... Nothing like that, no. He just kind of stumbles out of the bushes, says "sucks your wife died, but now I don't feel so angry at you anymore so I'm gonna lay this gun down - barrel pointing at me (why??) - breathe heavy for a little bit with a look on my face that might imply some kind of potential menace to you, but not really - I'm just gonna die." And the whole time Tom couldn't seem less threatened. He just keeps looking out over the ocean, where he just moments earlier gave his supposedly mortally wounded wife to some mysterious tentacles from the deep (WTF?), though he does look over his shoulder at Pope once or twice, probably thinking the same thing we are: "GOD - just die. It's pointless and annoying that you even showed up right now."
To top off this whole travesty, at the end of the episode, we see the words: "Thanks For Watching the Last 5 Seasons!" I personally took that as adding insult to injury. Not only did you just pee all over 45 minutes of my life, now you're saying "Hey - look back at how much time you REALLY wasted just to get to this gigantic drooling let down!"
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