Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
- 166
- 1
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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).
It seems we're talking a bit past one another. I'm not really talking about episodic fillers, though of course those can also be a problem. To me the entire premise of the third and fourth season felt tacked on in the typical style of how tv shows always have to expand the scope from personal adventures to grand, world-saving heroism when they run out of interesting small-scope ideas.
To elaborate a bit (spoiler, obviously): The original premise of the first season was about how the four thought they were sent mistakenly to heaven, but actually it's hell and they're instead supposed to be mentally torturing each other. Then we also find out in the second season that despite getting rebooted over and over, they always find out the truth and in addition, they actually become better people. They then appeal their case to a judge. And ... that's actually already a good story. Imo they should have simply gotten into limbo or maybe even heaven, that's it, with the implication that appeals along these lines are already not terribly uncommon. But finding out that nobody has been to heaven in ages due to an extremely simplistic, stupid point systems was not only completely unnecessary to the original idea, from the start it was imo a bad and rather arrogant premise. This is compounded by how it's solved by exactly those four humans who originally were extremely vapid and self-involved. Them eventually improving to a point that they don't belong into hell anymore is a nice idea; Turning them into moral geniuses that re-design the entire system is, again, stupid and arrogant. The ending of "heaven gets boring, so suicide" is also, again, unnecessary to THAT premise.
Otherwise, I unsurprisingly strongly agree with your earlier post. I'm a solidly in the technofuturist transhumanist "good-things-are-good" camp, and I have nothing but scorn for the showrunner's values. But even independent of that, I think that just keeping the story tightly focused on the original premise would have been much better. If anything, I'd have preferred a few seasons of episodic hijinks along that line to the ever-increasing scope we got instead.
I think I understand you now. You didn't sell me on "tacked on", though - IMHO as long as stakes are raised steadily that's just a common way of writing in general, not a failing and not specific to TV shows. There are a lot of ways to do it wrong (writers who rely on expanding scope because that's the only way they can raise interest, writers who run out of interesting grand-scope ideas too and then end up with an anticlimax or with no sense of stakes, writers who can't or don't bother to come up with convincing Watsonian reasons for the higher stakes and for their particular protagonists to be critical to them...) but I don't think the writers here made any of the typical errors; I think we just have a difference of taste here. You might be right that following your tastes would have led to a better result overall, or even to a result that I'd think was better.
You definitely did sell me on "arrogant", butany kind of "here's how heaven works" worldbuilding pretty much has to be that.
I thought they were somewhat humble about parts of the expanded premise, given their milieu.
And I stand firm on the idea that, despite the arrogance, the fatal flaw here was that the writers weren't brave enough to be arrogant enough:
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link