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I watched Dark this Lent and it made me wonder what series don't have a final season that doesn't struggle with the pacing.
Spoilers ahead
Everyone knows about AGoT season 8, no need to even mention it.
Breaking Bad is one of the highest-rated shows ever, but I really hated the pacing of the final season. The show has just spent two seasons dealing with Gustavo Fring, Walter White has evolved greatly as a character, but as a crime lord, he's back at square one again. But it's the final season already, so the plot shifts down two gears and accelerates greatly. By the season's midpoint and with the help of several montages, Walter White has found new associates, rebuilt his drug empire, eliminated everyone who stood in his way, earned a literal bed-sized pile of money and retired, just so we have enough episodes left for his inevitable downfall. I still have whiplash from it.
It's the same with Dark. The first season introduces time travel and scatters the cast between 2019 and 1986 and 1953. The second season introduces even more characters, adds 1920 and 2052 to the mix, along with a whole new parallel timeline in the cliffhanger without even starting to open the lineup of mystery boxes that would've made J.J. Abrams proud. Then, in the breadth of a single season, it adds one more jump into the past, shows the parallel timeline along with its parallel cast, its distaff counterpart to the main antagonist and her own goal, adds some quantum mechanics to save the protagonist, twice, and them hurriedly starts to open every remaining mystery box in a row without even explaining the logic behind them because it's running out of screen time and it still has to tell us, out of the blue, that both worlds are just the result of an experiment gone wrong and the protagonist has to go back in time in the real world to prevent them from being created altogether. The end. Don't think very hard why all these children from season 1 actually had to die.
So, is there a series that has the final season that doesn't feel either rushed or drawn out, that finishes exactly how and when it should?
Imo The Good Place dragged out far too much, but I also greatly disliked the direction it went into later for other reasons that are arguably subjective, so YMMV.
Nah. In particular, they went in to Season 2 with a perfect excuse to write an arbitrarily long, very episodic stretch of filler material, and they basically ignored that, time skipped as necessary, and kept the show pacing tight anyway.
And yet this time I won't argue, for a sufficiently narrow definition of "later". I thought the ending (by which I mean roughly the last episode and a half) was decent, but I was still disappointed. The rest of the show was great, not just decent. It also felt like there were multiple different ways they could have made the ending great instead, yet they didn't. They weren't smart enough to handle a better-in-nerdy-ways ending (in the second big block of spoilered text here), and they either weren't brave enough or truly broad-minded enough to handle a better-in-obvious-ways ending (in the final block there).
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