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What’s a mistake, and I believe unhealthy, is to imagine {that a} collection’s value is retroactively decided by its ending, it doesn’t matter what got here earlier than it. Because that promotes a fair sadder thought: That it’s a nasty transfer to speculate an excessive amount of in any story, as a result of it would finally allow you to down.
An incredible gymnastics routine is flawless. An incredible murals has memorable flaws. It has tough, unfinished edges that by no means cease chafing regardless of many what number of years they roll round within the rock tumbler of your unconscious.
The final episode of “The Curse,” for example, might have been concurrently essentially the most wonderful and maddening TV finale I’ve ever watched. At the top of this uncomfortable marriage dramedy, the home-flipper Asher Siegel (Nathan Fielder) woke to search out his private discipline of gravity reversed, an prolonged sequence of Kafkaesque slapstick that ended together with his falling upward to a frozen loss of life in orbit.
The finale was good, or it was pretentious. It upended viewers’ expectations, or it bought bizarre for weirdness’ sake. What it completely didn’t do was stick the touchdown. It actually did the alternative, sending its protagonist crusing off into house and leaving us to crane our necks to the sky and attempt to make which means of it. I’m nonetheless engaged on that.
That’s the opposite factor in regards to the idea of sticking the touchdown: It implies that judgment of a finale is rapid and immutable. We watch, we scribble on our rating playing cards, we declare the collection in or out of the pantheon. (Don’t get me began on “the pantheon.”)
As a critic, perhaps I’m alleged to faux to that type of finality. But I do know it’s a lie.
I used to be moved by the “Breaking Bad” finale when it aired; now I believe it was … effective, however a flat, something-for-everybody ending from a collection that peaked a few episodes earlier. I used to be lukewarm on the “Mad Men” finale and now discover that it, like almost every thing about that collection, holds up higher on rewatch than perhaps any present of its period. A decade later, I can a minimum of recognize what “How I Met Your Mother” was making an attempt to say about embracing second possibilities and never assuming that your individual story is over.
It’s been years since these collection ended and I’m nonetheless not completed with them, nor are they completed with me. This is a minimum of one advantage of “Did it stick the touchdown?”: It is a meaningless query, but it surely offers us an excuse to ponder and speak about significant issues. Maybe what issues most is neither the journey nor the vacation spot. It’s the place we let our minds journey after we’ve landed.
