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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?
I don't know how this didn't occur to me before, considering I just finished it recently. My girlfriend recommended a German black comedy series called How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast), whose fourth and final season came out last year. It concerns a recently dumped teenaged boy who, in a quest to win back his ex, starts a darkweb site to sell ecstasy in a bid to impress her. Consistently funny and engaging throughout with a cast of likeable characters, and no major drop-offs in quality from one season to the next. I will admit that the pacing in the last season felt a little rushed, but not fatally so, and the ending felt earned and satisfying. The only major downside I can see is that it's so much a product of its time that it may come off as somewhat dated ten years from now. As black comedies about unlikely drug barons go, for my money it's a better series than Breaking Bad, and I mean that without a shred of irony.
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