-This week in titles: Jane The Ordained.
-Wow. By Jane The Virgin standards, this was a pretty calm finale. I mean, yes there was a surprise pregnancy reveal, a wedding that threatened to turn into disaster every step of the way, multiple storms literal and figurative, another significant bus ride, a dangerous new alliance, secrets revealed, building romance, a big break-up, the life of one regular character threatened, the livelihood of another taken away and the arrival of a new (to us) love interest, but none of that really matches the emotional devastation of Mateo being kidnapped right after birth in season 1 or Rose shooting Michael in season 2. I'll certainly be curious about what happens next in season 4, but I definitely won't be an anxious as I was in the days leading up to the season 2 and 3 (especially 3) premieres. Which is a good thing. "Jane" already delivered the big gut-punch of the season back when Michael was killed at the mid-point. Had yet another season ended with some cataclysmic thing happening to Jane, it would've been too much to take. Instead we got an ending that was surprisingly hopeful (for the Villanueva's and Rogelio at least) and sets the stage for all kinds of possibilities going into season 4. It was a fitting end to a strong season of this wonderful show. So let's break down some of these developments a bit.
-Is there such a thing as destiny? Are people meant to come into each other's lives? Is love something that's meant to be? At the beginning of the series, Jane Villanueva would've answered "yes" to every one of these questions. She was a true romantic with a future that was all planned out and right in front of her. Even when she was accidentally inseminated and reconnected with a man she had a meaningful connection with one night years ago, it all seemed like destiny falling into place, and when she went to the altar with Michael after a long time apart, it felt inevitable, like it was supposed to happen. Over the course of the season though, as Jane lost Michael and grew older, her romanticism faded and she started to question the idea that things were "meant to be". Life isn't that easy. So when Jane tries to plan the wedding ceremony of her parents and tries to put into words why they're meant to be, nothing she comes up with feels right. She loves her parents and believes they have a true love so why can't she put it into words? Aren't they of all people meant to be? This question is where Chapter Sixty-Four does something surprising. It has Jane decide that no, Xiomara and Rogelio aren't meant to be. Instead, as the episode piles up obstacles and problems that threaten to derail the wedding entirely, it shows how Xo and Ro choose to be together, in the face of countless obstacles and three seasons worth of turbulence, they chose each other. It's not true love because it's meant to be, it's true love because they chose not to give up. It's a powerful idea for the show to explore and it does so masterfully, turning all the contrivances building throughout the episode that conspire to ruin the wedding from a tired old TV staple (You can probably count the number of TV weddings that go off without a hitch on one hand) into something more masterful, a sign of two people in love refusing to let anything stand in their way even when nature itself seemed aligned against them.
-I'll admit that I was a bit worried that something might ultimately end the engagement between Xo and Ro. So many times on "Jane", couples seem to be on the right track only to suddenly get pulled apart in less than an episode (For example, Rafael and Petra, who got together last episode and fell apart almost right away. We'll get to that). Xo and Ro have also had so many up and downs that it's hard to keep track of how many times they broke up and got back together. And yeah, they were solid now that Rogelio had reneged on his plans to have a kid of his own, but when Darci shows up heavily pregnant from the unprotected hate sex she and Rogelio had when they were together, it seemed quite possible that Rogelio and Xo would put their relationship on hold while they figured this out. Because it felt like the wedding might not happen though, that made it all the sweeter when Xo realizes that she's not going to walk away from Rogelio and does want to marry him after all.
-I was a bit disappointed that the idea of Rogelio wanting another kid had essentially been waved away because it made much of his season 3 arc and everything he went through with Darci into a way to stall for time until he changed his mind and got back with Xo as everyone knew he should. I should have had more faith in the "Jane" writers though. Darci being pregnant is a great way to show that Rogelio's quest to have a child does matter and will be affecting his life for a long time to come. It also means we get more Justina Machado, which is always a good thing.
-All the disasters and crises cause Xo and Ro to have a more intimate ceremony, which was at least partly because on a practical level the show probably couldn't pull off the kind of star-filled extravaganza a Rogelio wedding would demand. It works very well on a story level though, reinforcing that even with a ceremony with just their family, Rafael, Petra, and some random guests taking shelter from the storm, even with a muddied-dress and minimal lighting, as long as these two are together, they're still having their fairy tale wedding.
-The narrator mentioning that Xiomara looked beautiful to the people who loved her most was a wonderful callback to when Michael was trying stand-up and his set was well-received by the people who loved him most. Also with the way the narrator added an "including me" and the immediate shot of Mateo afterwards, I'm now pretty convinced that the narrator is a future Mateo who's written books about his mother's life.
-In an episode full of heart-warming tear-jerking moments, Alba yelling her heartfelt speech about how much she loves Xo and how proud of her she is so Xo wouldn't cry and ruin her make-up almost takes the cake. To be fair though, a letter from Michael written before he married Jane, explaining why he and her are meant to be is pretty damn hard to top.
-Though Jane The Virgin is a big fan of flashbacks, since Michael died, the show has refrained from using Brett Dier up until now. This is probably a wise choice. People needed time to adjust to the new status quo and having him pop up constantly in flashbacks would have been like rubbing salt in the wound, especially because you're immediately reminded of how charming and likeable Brett Dier is in the role. Tonight uses him well though as Jane's reverend informs her about a letter Michael wrote her before they got married that explained how he felt about her. This allows us to see flashbacks of Michael and Jane at their peak, about to be married and move into a home of their own, trading goofy banter and just being in love. Of course Jane would become fixated on trying to find this letter. Who wouldn't want to read new words from a loved one who was gone? It also ties into her story well and the episode's exploration of the idea of destiny. Jane wants to find this letter because it's a lost love letter from her dead husband, but also because if she could reconnect with her great love for a moment, then she might be able to use this letter as inspiration for the wedding ceremony. If she were to find this letter right before the ceremony, wouldn't that be meant to be? Ultimately she doesn't find the letter before the ceremony but the time she spends looking for it causes a series of events that lead her to the inspiration she needs on the bus.
-Fateful bus rides are one of those recurring motifs that "Jane" likes to work in at least once every season. Jane was on the bus the day she fainted and learned she was pregnant. She was on the bus when her water broke. She took the bus to her wedding. She takes the bus to her parent's wedding and this is where she sees an ad for upcoming book releases that includes a certain little book called Falling Snow by Jane Villaneuva. All of Jane's hard work and effort have paid off and the show uses this to have her come to her realization about what to say at Xo and Ro's wedding. Raf thinks seeing her name up there must feel meant to be but it doesn't feel meant to be for her because it wasn't easy. "Meant to be" implies something had to be easy but it took a lot of pain and strife and effort and hard choices to get this book published. The satisfaction Jane gets from seeing her name was the result of a choice she made to not give up and that leads her to realize exactly what she needs to say at the ceremony. It's a clever way to tie Jane's arc this year to the arc of her parents and the comparison feels totally natural. It's also a good way to have Jane realize that she no longer believes in destiny, right up until the ending when fate steps in (We'll get to that in a minute).
-With all the pressure Jane's under this episode and the spectre of Michael hanging over things, Jane's new-found feelings for Rafael are underplayed as she tries to ignore them. Unfortunately Petra picks up on them and becomes convinced that Rafael would still pick Jane over her if it came to it, which combined with a newly free Chuck trying to win her back winds up ending Petra and Rafael before they could really begin. It's a frustrating moment because even though Petra is right to be concerned that Jane has feelings for Rafael and her reaction is in-character, it also feels forced, like something thrown into the episode to manufacture maximum drama. Add in that intimate hug between Raf and Jane as they laugh off Petra's insistence that the two have feels for each other and the fact that Rafael's feelings for Jane are being kept ambiguous and it feels like the show is positioning things for a love triangle where everyone is on equal footing, which is less interesting than if Jane has to hide her feelings while Raf dates Petra. Of course, the episode kind of realizes this and has Petra off to get Raf back before she's waylaid, while Jane's ultimate decision to tell Rafael about her feelings also gets waylaid. Hopefully the show reverses this Raf/Petra break-up early on into season 4 because this feels like an unnecessary regression.
-OK, let's talk about that ending. So during the wedding reception, Petra and Rafael's assistant gives her the letter Michael had written, which she received from the previous owner of the house where Michael had stashed the letter who the current owners had contacted after Jane went there looking. It's a beautiful letter, designed to assure the Team Michael diehards that Jane and Michael truly were meant to be, give Jane permission to move on with Michael's "never doubt that I want you to be happy", and also make a strong case in favour of destiny. Sure Jane and Michael chose to be together, but they had only met at all because Michael stopped for a burger on his way back from a shift he wasn't supposed to be working and chose to answer a noise complaint. He made a bunch of random choices based on events that he had no way of controlling and he met the love of his life because of it. That's destiny. Meanwhile the series of choices that led to Jane getting the letter at all (Jane's choice to look for the letter, and check the old house, leading to the current owner's choice to contact the previous owner who had chosen to take that letter) has brought her back to Adam, her first great love.
-As far as season-ending twists go, this is a strong one and a welcome wrench into the road to Jane and Rafael getting back together. Adam was hinted at several episodes back and the references to Jane falling in love and breaking up with him in the flashbacks meant his appearance wasn't really a surprise. Having him be in possession of the letter though was a definite surprise and a great way to tie up the episode's look into destiny. Jane and Adam sure seemed destined to cross paths again, but are they meant to be? We'll have to wait until next season to find out, but I'm excited to learn more about this previously unknown chapter in Jane's life.
-Jane's first love being named Adam (the first man) is a great biblical allusion. Bravo whoever came up with that name for the character.
-In crime plot news, Scott's killer is finally revealed and it turns out to be Eileen. Not Rose pretending to be Eileen, but the actual Eileen who Rose had paid to leave the country under threat of death. A drunken Scott saw her and fearing that he would say something to give her away, Eileen kills him and flees. It'd be an underwhelming conclusion to a mystery that ran out of steam a few episodes back if not for the fantastic use of The Midnight Runner's Come On Eileen, which scores the whole flashback sequence. It's now obvious that naming Rose's new identity Eileen was solely so they could use that song for this specific scene and that's wonderful.
-With Rose finally behind the bars, the show finds a surprising new antagonist when Luisa finds out that Rafael lied about his cancer coming back. As I mentioned last week, Luisa's arc this season has been about her trying not to choose between her girlfriend and her family. Last week she picked her family, and now risks losing the love of her life because of it. Luisa and Rafael have always had a strained relationship due to Luisa's addiction issues and general "trainwreck" status but Rafael has always felt a loyalty to her until he found out the truth about "Eileen". Justin Baldoni and Yara Martinez have always had terrific sibling chemistry that made it easy to care about their relationship so watching that relationship be completely destroyed over the course of a single scene as Rafael pours out all his pent-up frustration and resentment is hard to watch. It feels earned though, the natural culmination of everything that's happened between these two this season and it leads to exciting story possibilities going forward. It also leads to a fantastic use of the heartglow as the warm love that Luisa feels for her brother turns into black hatred. Luisa has been a character that the show has often struggled to use in a meaningful way, but her personal connections to the characters (Rafael in particular) and the sympathy that Martinez's performance generates should make her into a compelling antagonist for the next little while.
-I predicted that Luisa would use the clause in Emilio's will against Rafael to make him lose everything. I had forgotten however that Luisa didn't know that part of the "Rafael is adopted" saga. Enter Anezka. When Rafael's discarded (for good reasons) sister meets Petra's discarded (for good reasons) sister, I gasped in delight even before the #TwistedSisters hashtag popped up. It's just such a natural character pairing. Both of these characters love their siblings, but have inflicted a lot of hurt onto them while being hurt by them. Of course they would team up. Suddenly Scott fixing the will addendum all those episodes back becomes more than a misdirect about why he was killed and Luisa's vast knowledge about how alcohol works comes in handy to help make Anezka realize that Petra had drugged her the night "Scott" broke up with her. So Anezka steals Rafael's phone and lures a "wanting to get back together" Petra to a secluded spot where she's waiting with a gun. Luisa kicks Rafael out of the Marbella and officially takes control. It leaves both Rafael and Petra in a very uncertain place to end the season. Rafael has been defined by his wealth and privilege for so long, it'll be interesting to see how he reacts to losing it and how he'll fight back against Luisa. Meanwhile it seems unlikely that Petra will die or be replaced again, there's still a lot of damage that Anezka could do. I suspect she'll have Petra sign away her shares of the Marbella to her or Luisa. Whatever happens I'm excited to see where this all goes.
-Well that's it for Jane The Virgin season 3. This continues to be one of my favourite shows on TV and I'm going to miss it a lot while it's gone. October can't come soon enough.
Showing posts with label Finale. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Finale. Show all posts
Wednesday, 24 May 2017
Saturday, 21 January 2017
The Good Place Ends It's Season On A Stunning High Note
I don't typically put spoiler warnings in my recap but trust me. If you have yet to see the last episode of The Good Place's first season, do not read this review. You'll thank me later.
-Twists are tricky. A well-deployed one can change or re-contextualize the direction of the narrative in a way that revitalizes the story and captures the hearts and imagination of the audience. A bad or poorly-executed one can sink the story and drive the audience away in droves. It's especially hard if your show is full of big twists because if you're not careful, you could wind up sacrificing meaningful character development in service of the plot. The Good Place had a new twist practically every episode, but it managed to pull it off because the show was always keeping it rooted in the characters and their journeys. The twists and the mystery were fun but also besides the point. And when tonight's finale featured a massive twist of world-shattering proportions, it worked like gangbusters because of how well it clarified it's characters in addition to what was happening around them.
-The best twists are the ones that are hidden in plain sight, unseen because we don't realize what we're looking at or what clues we should be paying attention to. Throughout the first season of The Good Place, something has always felt a little off. It's not just that Eleanor and Jason wound up in the wrong place by some kind of convenient cosmic error, it's also how Michael was always terrible at putting his guests at ease (As well as just being terrible at his job in general) or how for heaven, no one was ever at peace. It's how Tahani managed to get in, despite the fact that the motivation behind her lifetime of good work was always suspect or how a nervous wreck like Chidi who couldn't even write his book qualified. There was something not right, but that feeling of weirdness could easily be chalked up to (depending on the plot point) first-season kinks or the vaguely-defined rules that the show's universe followed. Instead, all the little inconsistencies and weirdness turned out to be very intentional as we learned that our heroes have actually been in the bad place this whole time, part of an experiment designed by Michael (architect for The Bad Place) to subject them to their own personal hell where they torture each other. Everyone else in the neighborhood is a bad place actor (Hence why we never really spent time with anyone outside of our core group) and they've been pushing them to make each other miserable. It's an incredible twist and one that immediately makes me want to re-watch the season to see how it plays now that the whole picture has been revealed.
-The great thing about this twist is it doesn't negate or render any of the character growth we've seen this season irrelevant. The reset sort of does it but I doubt it'll last that long before our characters have their memories back next season (Assuming there is a next season. I'm hopeful though). Sure Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, Jason, and Janet to an extent were being manipulated all season, but the growth they experienced is real and they're probably on their way to belonging to the good place for real. Well, not Jason. If anything this episode doubled down on his selfishness and awful behavior. The rest of them are getting better though.
-Chidi's flashbacks now take on greater significance in retrospect because they're no longer just about how his need to do the right thing tortured and paralyzed him over the years, they're explaining how a life of alienating and hurting everyone he cared about as a result of that compulsion to do the right thing caused him to fall short of entering the real good place. Without those flashbacks, it would be much more of a stretch that Chidi belonged in the bad place (Tahani makes much more sense as a bad placer).
-That smile though! Ted Danson has been an all-star all season but that moment when Michael gives up the charade and shows his true colours was next-level good. It's a huge shock but there's so much subtlety into how Danson plays the switch. He's like a terrific method actor who suddenly breaks character. It's super jarring in the best possible way and it'll be interesting to see him play both versions of the character if/when the show returns. It's also really impressive how manipulative the majority of Michael's behavior becomes in retrospect now that his true motivations have come to life.
-Though the twist winds up dwarfing everything else that happens in these two episodes (Especially since the whole Shawn thing was just a ruse and the whole "pick any two people to go to the bad place" thing was only there to set up Eleanor figuring out the truth), I do want to talk about the first episode of the night Mindy St. Claire for a minute, particularly the medium place.
-"Mindy St. Claire" was a strong episode for showing how far Eleanor has come since she died, despite her efforts to run away from it and live in eternal mediocrity. The opening flashback to her final moments shows her at the height of her selfishness, the culmination of years of taking care of only herself that began when she emancipated herself from her even more selfish parents. She truly has changed and even if Shawn's threat to "send" Chidi and Tahani to the bad place wasn't there, it's likely she would've eventually gone back on her own. She's not a medium person anymore and even when Jason tries to lull her into staying, she's able to stay strong and convince him of their need to go back.
-As for Mindy St. Claire herself, Maribeth Monroe does a great job, playing someone who has made peace with her life of isolation and imperfect lifestyle, despite having not entirely kicked her cocaine addiction. She also serves as the platonic ideal of a "medium" person: someone who did bad things before having the intention to follow through with a grand idea she got (while on cocaine) for a charity that would genuinely help people, which was enough to save her from torture after she immediately died (The foundation was established posthumously). She's like a heightened version of Eleanor and the perfect final temptation for her to overcome on her quest to be better than medium.
-The big question about the medium place post-twist though is if it was real or part of the post-confession scrambling. I'm leaning towards real because Janet wasn't part of the ruse and Mindy seems like too promising a character to just discard on a one-off appearance that didn't matter. I guess we'll see though (Hopefully).
-Real Eleanor turns out to be Fake Eleanor. Tirya Sircar played genuine goodness so well that it was actually shocking (and hilarious) when she suddenly drops the ruse and reveals herself to be another bad place jerk. Hopefully there's room for more of Vicky in season 2, though they'd have to find something new for her character to do since we all know Fake Eleanor's goodness is a sham.
-Janet falling in love with Jason was real! Aww, that's sweet. I don't have a whole lot of interest in an Eleanor/Chidi/Tahani love triangle (At least not with Chidi as the center) but Janet and Jason forever! Their attempts to figure out how to have sex were terrific.
-I'm not sure which joke I liked more: Jason's failed attempt to destroy the train with a Molotov cocktail or Eleanor realizing that she might legit be into Tahani. Both were great for different reasons. Jason's for how the episode makes you think this will work for a split second before it fizzes out terrifically and Eleanor's for how well it pays off the running joke of Eleanor describing how beautiful and perfect Tahani is.
-Marc Evan Jackson was perfect as "Shawn" (If that is his real name), both before and after the reveal. The joke that his character goes into a literal cocoon when a situation becomes the slightest bit emotional was also great and made perfect use of the dry emotionless monotone that he somehow rings so much nuance from. Who knew there was such a stark contrast between normal indifference, cruel indifference, and annoyed indifference?
-It's telling that when Eleanor has seconds to write a note to herself to help her break the cycle she chose "Find Chidi". She could've said "Don't Trust Michael" or "This is the Bad Place" or any number of things but she prioritized finding the man who helped turn her into a better person because she knows she can't become a better person or break the cycle without him. That's a more convincing sign of the Eleanor/Chidi bond than any silly love triangle.
-Also this exchange: "I feel like I failed you". "No. Don't ever think that. I was dropped into a cave, and you were my flashlight".
-Bambajan bursting in with an obscure precedent that could fix everything and being waved away by Eleanor was terrific. I really hope we get to spend more time with the employees of the bad place next season as they try to maintain this insanely elaborate ruse for 1000 years.
-The idea of starting season 2 with all the characters reset to their season 1 selves but separated from each other with some details changed is certainly promising. Eleanor being given a new shirtless mailman soulmate is funny already. Changing the focus of the show from "selfish person tries to learn to become good" to "flawed people who are better together try to come together and overcome the bad place" is a smart call. Before it was hard to see the premise of The Good Place sustaining itself for that long. Now, it's easy to see how this show could be sustainable.
-So that's it for season 1 of The Good Place. This has been one of the best first seasons of a TV comedy I've seen in a while and I'm very hopeful that we'll get more of this wonderful show in the future.
-Twists are tricky. A well-deployed one can change or re-contextualize the direction of the narrative in a way that revitalizes the story and captures the hearts and imagination of the audience. A bad or poorly-executed one can sink the story and drive the audience away in droves. It's especially hard if your show is full of big twists because if you're not careful, you could wind up sacrificing meaningful character development in service of the plot. The Good Place had a new twist practically every episode, but it managed to pull it off because the show was always keeping it rooted in the characters and their journeys. The twists and the mystery were fun but also besides the point. And when tonight's finale featured a massive twist of world-shattering proportions, it worked like gangbusters because of how well it clarified it's characters in addition to what was happening around them.
-The best twists are the ones that are hidden in plain sight, unseen because we don't realize what we're looking at or what clues we should be paying attention to. Throughout the first season of The Good Place, something has always felt a little off. It's not just that Eleanor and Jason wound up in the wrong place by some kind of convenient cosmic error, it's also how Michael was always terrible at putting his guests at ease (As well as just being terrible at his job in general) or how for heaven, no one was ever at peace. It's how Tahani managed to get in, despite the fact that the motivation behind her lifetime of good work was always suspect or how a nervous wreck like Chidi who couldn't even write his book qualified. There was something not right, but that feeling of weirdness could easily be chalked up to (depending on the plot point) first-season kinks or the vaguely-defined rules that the show's universe followed. Instead, all the little inconsistencies and weirdness turned out to be very intentional as we learned that our heroes have actually been in the bad place this whole time, part of an experiment designed by Michael (architect for The Bad Place) to subject them to their own personal hell where they torture each other. Everyone else in the neighborhood is a bad place actor (Hence why we never really spent time with anyone outside of our core group) and they've been pushing them to make each other miserable. It's an incredible twist and one that immediately makes me want to re-watch the season to see how it plays now that the whole picture has been revealed.
-The great thing about this twist is it doesn't negate or render any of the character growth we've seen this season irrelevant. The reset sort of does it but I doubt it'll last that long before our characters have their memories back next season (Assuming there is a next season. I'm hopeful though). Sure Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, Jason, and Janet to an extent were being manipulated all season, but the growth they experienced is real and they're probably on their way to belonging to the good place for real. Well, not Jason. If anything this episode doubled down on his selfishness and awful behavior. The rest of them are getting better though.
-Chidi's flashbacks now take on greater significance in retrospect because they're no longer just about how his need to do the right thing tortured and paralyzed him over the years, they're explaining how a life of alienating and hurting everyone he cared about as a result of that compulsion to do the right thing caused him to fall short of entering the real good place. Without those flashbacks, it would be much more of a stretch that Chidi belonged in the bad place (Tahani makes much more sense as a bad placer).
-That smile though! Ted Danson has been an all-star all season but that moment when Michael gives up the charade and shows his true colours was next-level good. It's a huge shock but there's so much subtlety into how Danson plays the switch. He's like a terrific method actor who suddenly breaks character. It's super jarring in the best possible way and it'll be interesting to see him play both versions of the character if/when the show returns. It's also really impressive how manipulative the majority of Michael's behavior becomes in retrospect now that his true motivations have come to life.
-Though the twist winds up dwarfing everything else that happens in these two episodes (Especially since the whole Shawn thing was just a ruse and the whole "pick any two people to go to the bad place" thing was only there to set up Eleanor figuring out the truth), I do want to talk about the first episode of the night Mindy St. Claire for a minute, particularly the medium place.
-"Mindy St. Claire" was a strong episode for showing how far Eleanor has come since she died, despite her efforts to run away from it and live in eternal mediocrity. The opening flashback to her final moments shows her at the height of her selfishness, the culmination of years of taking care of only herself that began when she emancipated herself from her even more selfish parents. She truly has changed and even if Shawn's threat to "send" Chidi and Tahani to the bad place wasn't there, it's likely she would've eventually gone back on her own. She's not a medium person anymore and even when Jason tries to lull her into staying, she's able to stay strong and convince him of their need to go back.
-As for Mindy St. Claire herself, Maribeth Monroe does a great job, playing someone who has made peace with her life of isolation and imperfect lifestyle, despite having not entirely kicked her cocaine addiction. She also serves as the platonic ideal of a "medium" person: someone who did bad things before having the intention to follow through with a grand idea she got (while on cocaine) for a charity that would genuinely help people, which was enough to save her from torture after she immediately died (The foundation was established posthumously). She's like a heightened version of Eleanor and the perfect final temptation for her to overcome on her quest to be better than medium.
-The big question about the medium place post-twist though is if it was real or part of the post-confession scrambling. I'm leaning towards real because Janet wasn't part of the ruse and Mindy seems like too promising a character to just discard on a one-off appearance that didn't matter. I guess we'll see though (Hopefully).
-Real Eleanor turns out to be Fake Eleanor. Tirya Sircar played genuine goodness so well that it was actually shocking (and hilarious) when she suddenly drops the ruse and reveals herself to be another bad place jerk. Hopefully there's room for more of Vicky in season 2, though they'd have to find something new for her character to do since we all know Fake Eleanor's goodness is a sham.
-Janet falling in love with Jason was real! Aww, that's sweet. I don't have a whole lot of interest in an Eleanor/Chidi/Tahani love triangle (At least not with Chidi as the center) but Janet and Jason forever! Their attempts to figure out how to have sex were terrific.
-I'm not sure which joke I liked more: Jason's failed attempt to destroy the train with a Molotov cocktail or Eleanor realizing that she might legit be into Tahani. Both were great for different reasons. Jason's for how the episode makes you think this will work for a split second before it fizzes out terrifically and Eleanor's for how well it pays off the running joke of Eleanor describing how beautiful and perfect Tahani is.
-Marc Evan Jackson was perfect as "Shawn" (If that is his real name), both before and after the reveal. The joke that his character goes into a literal cocoon when a situation becomes the slightest bit emotional was also great and made perfect use of the dry emotionless monotone that he somehow rings so much nuance from. Who knew there was such a stark contrast between normal indifference, cruel indifference, and annoyed indifference?
-It's telling that when Eleanor has seconds to write a note to herself to help her break the cycle she chose "Find Chidi". She could've said "Don't Trust Michael" or "This is the Bad Place" or any number of things but she prioritized finding the man who helped turn her into a better person because she knows she can't become a better person or break the cycle without him. That's a more convincing sign of the Eleanor/Chidi bond than any silly love triangle.
-Also this exchange: "I feel like I failed you". "No. Don't ever think that. I was dropped into a cave, and you were my flashlight".
-Bambajan bursting in with an obscure precedent that could fix everything and being waved away by Eleanor was terrific. I really hope we get to spend more time with the employees of the bad place next season as they try to maintain this insanely elaborate ruse for 1000 years.
-The idea of starting season 2 with all the characters reset to their season 1 selves but separated from each other with some details changed is certainly promising. Eleanor being given a new shirtless mailman soulmate is funny already. Changing the focus of the show from "selfish person tries to learn to become good" to "flawed people who are better together try to come together and overcome the bad place" is a smart call. Before it was hard to see the premise of The Good Place sustaining itself for that long. Now, it's easy to see how this show could be sustainable.
-So that's it for season 1 of The Good Place. This has been one of the best first seasons of a TV comedy I've seen in a while and I'm very hopeful that we'll get more of this wonderful show in the future.
Friday, 1 April 2016
Why I (Mostly) Like The Way How I Met Your Mother Ended
Two years ago this week, after 9 seasons and 206 episodes How I Met Your Mother aired Last Forever, the two-part last episodes of the series and the end of the story they began telling way back in 2005. The show was a few years removed from it's peak, and the last couple of seasons had been fairly inconsistent (Setting the entirety of season 9 over the course of one weekend was a bold and interesting creative choice, but also one that led to a lot of filler and time-wasting), but there had been enough glimmers of the shows former greatness in the last season (particularly everything with Cristin Milioti playing the mother) to suggest they could stick the landing, even with a worrying bit of foreshadowing in one of the last episodes. And then the last episodes aired. And the internet lost it.
Serious spoilers for a 2-year-old ending from here on out, yo!
In case you've blocked out the details from your memory, let me quickly refresh you on what happened to make everyone so upset. Last Forever takes us from the day Ted met Tracy (The mother) at Barney and Robin's wedding and shows us what happened to the gang in the years that followed. We find out that Barney and Robin divorced three years in because Robin's job caused her to spend too much time on the road making Barney unhappy that he never got to see her. This causes Robin to push herself away from the gang, not being able to handle being around Barney or Ted, who she's starting to feel she should have ended up with. It also convinces Barney that he's not able to be in a committed relationship and pushes him back to his old ways, until he knocks up a girl (never seen or given a name beyond 31) and gets a daughter, who makes him love again and brings out his paternal side. Meanwhile, though their wedding is delayed by a sudden pregnancy and then put off through the years, Ted and Tracy finally wed in 2020 and Ted loves her with everything she has. And then in 2024, she gets sick and dies. That's when 2030 Ted finally shows us the first meeting of him and Tracy in 2013 and ends his story. At which point his daughter tells him it's obvious the reason he told them this long story is because he wants to ask out Robin and wants to see if they're OK with it. Ted denies it but they tell him that after 6 years, it's time to move on so he shows up at Robin's with the blue french horn he stole so many years ago, ready to start again. End of show.
So yeah.
Obviously this was upsetting to many people. After 9 seasons, this was how they ended the show? With the mother dying and Ted and Robin back together? Really? And after a season where we got to spend time with the mother and fell in love with her ourselves, thanks to the superb performance of Cristin Milioti? And that stuff with the kids was filmed during season 2 so clearly this had been the plan all along. Never mind that the ending recontextualizes what the entire show was about. It was a lot to take and for the most part, people rejected the ending hard.
But here's the thing. I have watched Last Forever several times now and I like the ending. Is it perfect? No, and I'm going to talk about my issues with the ending very quick. But I think it's a daring ending and a beautiful one. I fully understand why people hate it so much and why most people aren't going to give it a second chance, but I'm not one of those people. So if you'll let me, let's go through that ending a bit closer.
What Doesn't Work About The Ending
For starters, let's look at Barney's storyline for a minute. Mainly the part where he gets a girl pregnant. This is something that happens at the end of his attempt at a perfect month (sleeping with 31 women in 31 days). It's a long-delayed consequence to his years of sleeping around and treating women like objects. The problem is the woman he sleeps with is basically an object. We never meet her. We never learn her actual name or her feelings about this pregnancy or Barney or anything. Her only purpose is to give Barney Ellie, the daughter he falls immediately in love with that causes him to stop hitting on young girls and start encouraging them to make better life choices. And it's weird. The show had always (well usually) been critical of Barney dehumanizing women as anonymous conquests and it was leaving the mother of his child, an anonymous conquest. Obviously Barney's arc wasn't the main focus of the episode, but this is still something that doesn't sit quite right with me.
That's a minor thing though. Let's get to my main issue with the ending: the scene with Ted's kids. In the early days of the show, the kids were a somewhat active part, commenting on the story from time to time as Ted told it. But as the show kept going and the kids started ageing, they stopped contributing to the action and became silent observers, through the magic of stock footage. But not before they shot one last scene to be held for the last episode. This scene was written and filmed back during season 2, where more people would have been onboard with Ted and Robin ending up together. It was also when the tone of the show was a lot lighter than the more emotional tone they would flirt with in the later seasons and when they had no idea the show would last 9 years or that they would spend much more time with Tracy than they had originally planned. Lyndsy Fonseca and David Henrie also weren't great actors back then so their delivery is kind of off. Also about a minute into the scene, the laugh track kicks in for some reason, lending the whole affair of Ted deciding to move on a oddly jovial feel. As a result, the scene is broad and off-putting, causing massive tonal whiplash between a scene crucial to the end of the series and what had come right before that makes it seem wildly out of place.
This combines with another misstep, which is us jumping from finding out Tracy got sick to the meeting to 2030 with no look at the 6 years during that time of Ted mourning the lost of his great love. To the characters, the mother has been dead for 6 years so of course it's OK for Ted to move on. But for us, the mother has been dead for about a minute and a half and before we as an audience can process it, now Ted is running off to get Robin. This causes people to get the wrong idea about the ending. It makes Tracy seem like a disposable figure in Ted's life, there to give him the children that Robin never would and keep him busy while Robin was getting the success Ted might have held her back from, and then die, giving them their chance to be together. If there had been even a glimpse of a Ted contemplating his lost, or if that damn kids scene had been shot differently to better convey the enormity of Ted's decision, maybe the last scene would've played a little better. It's a shame. Because that last scene is beautiful.
Why I Like The Ending
Look, after 9 years of spending time with these characters, it would have been easy for Craig Thomas and Carter Bays to let their characters just sail off into the sunset and have a final episode that was purely a happy ending. But the world the show was in was always just a heightened version of our world and in our world, life seldom has purely happy endings. People grow apart. Marriages don't always work out. People get sick. The show had tackled less happy subject matter before in things like Marshall's dad dying or Robin learning she was infertile. The idea that the gang might drift apart as the years went by had come up as early as season 4 and had been coming up more and more often as the show got older. A purely happy, purely fan-service ending might have worked, but it also would have been disingenuous to what the show was. So yes, it's difficult and sad to watch Barney and Robin divorce and Barney regress to his old ways because he's convinced he can't change. It's hard seeing the gang drift apart over the years as life gets in the way. And it's terrible that Tracy dies. But all that makes for a finale that's ambitious and challenging and an interesting subversion of a lot of the shows themes (Though there is an alternate cut of the finale available on the season 9 DVD where Tracy doesn't die that works just as well, so I'm not going to say that Tracy had to die for the finale to be interesting). And the various trials the characters go through in the finales do lead to happy endings for essentially all the characters, which are only made better through the suffering they had to go to to get there. Marshall getting that judge call after years toiling at a terrible job or Barney meeting his daughter are powerful moments because of everything they went through.
Another thing the episode does incredibly well that gets overlooked because of what immediately preceded and followed the scene is the meeting of Ted and Tracy. It's a big scene, and the entire series had been building up to it. And as the years had gone on, there was a lot of pressure on this scene to be significant. Especially because Ted spends a good part of season 8, and 9 fighting his feelings for Robin. And season 9 took place over the course of a weekend, so in the shows timeline, Ted is in love with another woman hours before meeting his future wife and about to move to Chicago to get away from those feelings. So the connection between Ted and Tracy had to be strong enough that he would cancel his plans to move so he could see this girl again. And the scene delivers big-time. Don't believe that? Watch it again.
It's a beautiful scene, one of the best the show would ever do, and the chemistry between Radnor and Milioti is immediate. We watch them instantly connect, see them use their connection to Tracy's former roommate Cindy to establish a sense of familiarity, watch them banter about the fabled yellow umbrella and see that lead them to see they were more connected than they previously thought. It pays off two big things we knew about the mother (She was in the Econ 305 class Ted accidentally taught and she left her yellow umbrella in a club on St. Patricks Day where Ted also was) and weaves them together beautifully and by the end of the scene, you can see they were in love from the start. Just try not to get chills as they say "hi" to each other again, oblivious to the fact that the train they were waiting for is passing them by. It's a stunning sequence whether used as the ending to the show (as it is in the alternate ending I recommend you watch if you hated the official one) or as only an ending to the story Ted has been telling his kids. An affirmation that no matter where Ted's life goes from there, he will always love that woman with the yellow umbrella. She was the one.
The thing is though, there's no such thing as "the one". You can have more than one true love. And if you lose your love, it's possible to start again. It doesn't diminish the love you had or mean you loved them any less. It just means you're keeping on living. That's the ultimate message of what How I Met Your Mother is trying to say in that ending. It's a subversion of most romantic comedies and a lot of what the show had been seemingly trying to say about love up to that point. It's something they lay the groundwork for in How Your Mother Met Me, a Tracy spotlight episode that shows her attempting to move on from her great love after he tragically died and deciding she was ready to move on hours before she met Ted. Now while on some level Tracy would always love Max (her dead boyfriend), that doesn't mean she didn't love Ted just as much. Ted wasn't a consolation prize in place of what she really wanted. And Tracy wasn't a consolation prize either. Relationships are complex and this was something the show made an admirable (if, admittedly flawed) effort to tackle.
Which brings us to the Robin of it all. As I mentioned above, the ending recontextualizes what the entire show had been about. It was no longer just a story about Ted telling his kids how he met their mother. Or, more accurately, Ted telling his kids about the long journey he had to take to be ready to meet their mother. It was now a story about a man who had lost one of the loves of his life, but was starting to realize the one who got away might be ready to start again. It was about a man telling his kids all the things he went through to meet their mother, trying to get them to understand and get their permission to give himself permission to move on. And if the second-to-last scene of the show fails to convey all that, the last scene gets it perfectly.
Underscored to Heaven by The Walkmen, we see Robin enter an apartment that's not too different from her apartment at the beginning of the series. Her door is buzzing, and with future technology on the fritz she has no choice to stick her head out the window to see who it is. And she sees Ted, standing there with the Blue French Horn, that's been a symbol of their relationship for the run of the show. It's a near-exact mirror of a scene from the show's pilot, but it's different now. They've been through so much in their lives and are different people from the ones who met all those years ago. And it all comes through in the facial expressions on both their faces without a single word being uttered once Robin looks out that window. You can see her confusion turn to bewilderment turn to joy as Ted smiles on. And the steps the show took to get to this scene got a bit muddled at the end, but if you can find it in you to get past that clumsiness, what you see is an incredibly effective scene that feels like the culmination of everything the show has been building towards. Life isn't simple. There is no such thing as a perfect love story. But you can start again if you just try. It's an ending, but it's also a beginning and it's a beginning that resonates because it suggests there's always hope. And honestly, long after all the shows I currently watch and many of the shows I will watch end, I'm probably not going to remember that scene with Ted's kids, but I will remember that final shot of Ted holding up that Blue French Horn, with all the questions and promise it implies, and I'm going to smile because the hope of that ending is a powerful thing.
Serious spoilers for a 2-year-old ending from here on out, yo!
In case you've blocked out the details from your memory, let me quickly refresh you on what happened to make everyone so upset. Last Forever takes us from the day Ted met Tracy (The mother) at Barney and Robin's wedding and shows us what happened to the gang in the years that followed. We find out that Barney and Robin divorced three years in because Robin's job caused her to spend too much time on the road making Barney unhappy that he never got to see her. This causes Robin to push herself away from the gang, not being able to handle being around Barney or Ted, who she's starting to feel she should have ended up with. It also convinces Barney that he's not able to be in a committed relationship and pushes him back to his old ways, until he knocks up a girl (never seen or given a name beyond 31) and gets a daughter, who makes him love again and brings out his paternal side. Meanwhile, though their wedding is delayed by a sudden pregnancy and then put off through the years, Ted and Tracy finally wed in 2020 and Ted loves her with everything she has. And then in 2024, she gets sick and dies. That's when 2030 Ted finally shows us the first meeting of him and Tracy in 2013 and ends his story. At which point his daughter tells him it's obvious the reason he told them this long story is because he wants to ask out Robin and wants to see if they're OK with it. Ted denies it but they tell him that after 6 years, it's time to move on so he shows up at Robin's with the blue french horn he stole so many years ago, ready to start again. End of show.
So yeah.
Obviously this was upsetting to many people. After 9 seasons, this was how they ended the show? With the mother dying and Ted and Robin back together? Really? And after a season where we got to spend time with the mother and fell in love with her ourselves, thanks to the superb performance of Cristin Milioti? And that stuff with the kids was filmed during season 2 so clearly this had been the plan all along. Never mind that the ending recontextualizes what the entire show was about. It was a lot to take and for the most part, people rejected the ending hard.
But here's the thing. I have watched Last Forever several times now and I like the ending. Is it perfect? No, and I'm going to talk about my issues with the ending very quick. But I think it's a daring ending and a beautiful one. I fully understand why people hate it so much and why most people aren't going to give it a second chance, but I'm not one of those people. So if you'll let me, let's go through that ending a bit closer.
What Doesn't Work About The Ending
For starters, let's look at Barney's storyline for a minute. Mainly the part where he gets a girl pregnant. This is something that happens at the end of his attempt at a perfect month (sleeping with 31 women in 31 days). It's a long-delayed consequence to his years of sleeping around and treating women like objects. The problem is the woman he sleeps with is basically an object. We never meet her. We never learn her actual name or her feelings about this pregnancy or Barney or anything. Her only purpose is to give Barney Ellie, the daughter he falls immediately in love with that causes him to stop hitting on young girls and start encouraging them to make better life choices. And it's weird. The show had always (well usually) been critical of Barney dehumanizing women as anonymous conquests and it was leaving the mother of his child, an anonymous conquest. Obviously Barney's arc wasn't the main focus of the episode, but this is still something that doesn't sit quite right with me.
That's a minor thing though. Let's get to my main issue with the ending: the scene with Ted's kids. In the early days of the show, the kids were a somewhat active part, commenting on the story from time to time as Ted told it. But as the show kept going and the kids started ageing, they stopped contributing to the action and became silent observers, through the magic of stock footage. But not before they shot one last scene to be held for the last episode. This scene was written and filmed back during season 2, where more people would have been onboard with Ted and Robin ending up together. It was also when the tone of the show was a lot lighter than the more emotional tone they would flirt with in the later seasons and when they had no idea the show would last 9 years or that they would spend much more time with Tracy than they had originally planned. Lyndsy Fonseca and David Henrie also weren't great actors back then so their delivery is kind of off. Also about a minute into the scene, the laugh track kicks in for some reason, lending the whole affair of Ted deciding to move on a oddly jovial feel. As a result, the scene is broad and off-putting, causing massive tonal whiplash between a scene crucial to the end of the series and what had come right before that makes it seem wildly out of place.
This combines with another misstep, which is us jumping from finding out Tracy got sick to the meeting to 2030 with no look at the 6 years during that time of Ted mourning the lost of his great love. To the characters, the mother has been dead for 6 years so of course it's OK for Ted to move on. But for us, the mother has been dead for about a minute and a half and before we as an audience can process it, now Ted is running off to get Robin. This causes people to get the wrong idea about the ending. It makes Tracy seem like a disposable figure in Ted's life, there to give him the children that Robin never would and keep him busy while Robin was getting the success Ted might have held her back from, and then die, giving them their chance to be together. If there had been even a glimpse of a Ted contemplating his lost, or if that damn kids scene had been shot differently to better convey the enormity of Ted's decision, maybe the last scene would've played a little better. It's a shame. Because that last scene is beautiful.
Why I Like The Ending
Look, after 9 years of spending time with these characters, it would have been easy for Craig Thomas and Carter Bays to let their characters just sail off into the sunset and have a final episode that was purely a happy ending. But the world the show was in was always just a heightened version of our world and in our world, life seldom has purely happy endings. People grow apart. Marriages don't always work out. People get sick. The show had tackled less happy subject matter before in things like Marshall's dad dying or Robin learning she was infertile. The idea that the gang might drift apart as the years went by had come up as early as season 4 and had been coming up more and more often as the show got older. A purely happy, purely fan-service ending might have worked, but it also would have been disingenuous to what the show was. So yes, it's difficult and sad to watch Barney and Robin divorce and Barney regress to his old ways because he's convinced he can't change. It's hard seeing the gang drift apart over the years as life gets in the way. And it's terrible that Tracy dies. But all that makes for a finale that's ambitious and challenging and an interesting subversion of a lot of the shows themes (Though there is an alternate cut of the finale available on the season 9 DVD where Tracy doesn't die that works just as well, so I'm not going to say that Tracy had to die for the finale to be interesting). And the various trials the characters go through in the finales do lead to happy endings for essentially all the characters, which are only made better through the suffering they had to go to to get there. Marshall getting that judge call after years toiling at a terrible job or Barney meeting his daughter are powerful moments because of everything they went through.
Another thing the episode does incredibly well that gets overlooked because of what immediately preceded and followed the scene is the meeting of Ted and Tracy. It's a big scene, and the entire series had been building up to it. And as the years had gone on, there was a lot of pressure on this scene to be significant. Especially because Ted spends a good part of season 8, and 9 fighting his feelings for Robin. And season 9 took place over the course of a weekend, so in the shows timeline, Ted is in love with another woman hours before meeting his future wife and about to move to Chicago to get away from those feelings. So the connection between Ted and Tracy had to be strong enough that he would cancel his plans to move so he could see this girl again. And the scene delivers big-time. Don't believe that? Watch it again.
It's a beautiful scene, one of the best the show would ever do, and the chemistry between Radnor and Milioti is immediate. We watch them instantly connect, see them use their connection to Tracy's former roommate Cindy to establish a sense of familiarity, watch them banter about the fabled yellow umbrella and see that lead them to see they were more connected than they previously thought. It pays off two big things we knew about the mother (She was in the Econ 305 class Ted accidentally taught and she left her yellow umbrella in a club on St. Patricks Day where Ted also was) and weaves them together beautifully and by the end of the scene, you can see they were in love from the start. Just try not to get chills as they say "hi" to each other again, oblivious to the fact that the train they were waiting for is passing them by. It's a stunning sequence whether used as the ending to the show (as it is in the alternate ending I recommend you watch if you hated the official one) or as only an ending to the story Ted has been telling his kids. An affirmation that no matter where Ted's life goes from there, he will always love that woman with the yellow umbrella. She was the one.
The thing is though, there's no such thing as "the one". You can have more than one true love. And if you lose your love, it's possible to start again. It doesn't diminish the love you had or mean you loved them any less. It just means you're keeping on living. That's the ultimate message of what How I Met Your Mother is trying to say in that ending. It's a subversion of most romantic comedies and a lot of what the show had been seemingly trying to say about love up to that point. It's something they lay the groundwork for in How Your Mother Met Me, a Tracy spotlight episode that shows her attempting to move on from her great love after he tragically died and deciding she was ready to move on hours before she met Ted. Now while on some level Tracy would always love Max (her dead boyfriend), that doesn't mean she didn't love Ted just as much. Ted wasn't a consolation prize in place of what she really wanted. And Tracy wasn't a consolation prize either. Relationships are complex and this was something the show made an admirable (if, admittedly flawed) effort to tackle.
Underscored to Heaven by The Walkmen, we see Robin enter an apartment that's not too different from her apartment at the beginning of the series. Her door is buzzing, and with future technology on the fritz she has no choice to stick her head out the window to see who it is. And she sees Ted, standing there with the Blue French Horn, that's been a symbol of their relationship for the run of the show. It's a near-exact mirror of a scene from the show's pilot, but it's different now. They've been through so much in their lives and are different people from the ones who met all those years ago. And it all comes through in the facial expressions on both their faces without a single word being uttered once Robin looks out that window. You can see her confusion turn to bewilderment turn to joy as Ted smiles on. And the steps the show took to get to this scene got a bit muddled at the end, but if you can find it in you to get past that clumsiness, what you see is an incredibly effective scene that feels like the culmination of everything the show has been building towards. Life isn't simple. There is no such thing as a perfect love story. But you can start again if you just try. It's an ending, but it's also a beginning and it's a beginning that resonates because it suggests there's always hope. And honestly, long after all the shows I currently watch and many of the shows I will watch end, I'm probably not going to remember that scene with Ted's kids, but I will remember that final shot of Ted holding up that Blue French Horn, with all the questions and promise it implies, and I'm going to smile because the hope of that ending is a powerful thing.
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