Ending it Well

Photo attribution: https://www.flickr.com/photos/joeshlabotnik/ / CC BY 2.0

 

Undergoing a dramatic and completely involuntary lifestyle rearrangement has been a depressingly frequent occurrence in my life.  From getting torn from my hometown as a child by a particularly dramatic familial disintegration, to having my left leg shattered into a million pieces by a wild Ford Taurus, to other, less action-packed ways to have my personal status quo sent into a bottomless abyss, I’ve had to rebuild from the ground up at least seven times that I can think of off the top of my head.  As a result, I’ve spent many a worried, harried night in bed thinking about “endings.”  I’m not a fan of them.  To be more precise, I hate them with the fury of a thousand suns.  Change is not something I embrace easily to begin with, and when that change comes in the form of everything in my life that makes me feel safe or happy being completely blown up with a bloody neutron bomb, I don’t react in the best way.  I cannot stand the idea of something that you enjoy or appreciate ending.  This is probably a function of my past life experiences, an instinctual, PTSD-style reaction borne out of the traumas, disappointments, failures, and raw pain that the aforementioned “lifestyle rearrangements” have wrought.  On the other side of one of those violent shifts in my life, when I actually manage to find something that doesn’t punch me right in the soul, I grab onto it with both hands, refusing to let go, much like Charlton Heston.

So, it should come as no shock that I feel the same way about stories that I enjoy.  I always hate getting to the end.  I remember when I would watch the original Star Wars Trilogy as a child, or the Back to the Future Trilogy.  I would always get sort of sad and wistful as I would get near the end of the third entries, because it meant the adventure was almost over.  An imminent return to boring reality was imminent.  I got warm fuzzies when, at the end of the final episode of the anime series Outlaw Star, the usual “To!  Be!  Continued!” that wrapped up each entry was replaced with a hearty and winking “See!  You!  Again!” promising more adventures, even though they never came (you heard me, goddamn it, they never came).  I was, quite possibly, the only person in the universe who was not annoyed by the 378 or so endings to the film adaptation of The Return of the King, because it felt like the story would still somehow continue.  I was disappointed and vaguely sad when Sam finally closed that door.

Since endings affect me so, the way creators handle the endings to their stories (assuming they get the chance to end them) is more important to me than to most people.  Which makes it all the more galling and frustrating that, while conversing with a friend recently about quality endings to television series, the only genuinely good final episodes I could name, after thinking about it for several minutes, were the final episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Babylon 5, and Breaking Bad.  Which begs the question, what on Earth is wrong with all of these Hollywood writers?  Why can’t they end their stories well?  Why is it, when they get to the end of their tales, the writers either dive off the freaking Cliffs of Insanity and pull something that feels like an episode from a completely different series out of the ether, or completely drop the ball and deliver a fundamentally unsatisfying and clearly rushed and cobbled together bookend for their show?  I’ve argued, at length, that when you’re telling a continuing, serialized story, you have to at least have a vague notion of where you’re going with it, lest you end up with a tangled, nonsensical mess that drives your viewers insane with unanswered questions and dangling plotlines.  That would explain the terrible, terrible ending to a series like Lost, but the phenomenon of the disappointing final episode cannot be explained away so easily, because the final episodes of nearly every sitcom and stand-alone episodic series are equally abysmal!

So, what’s going on here?  As I just pointed out above, lousy endings to serialized stories are the easiest to explain, with creators often either not planning ahead well-enough (Lost, The X-Files, Alias), or over-planning to the point that they end up writing themselves into a corner (the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, The Sopranos).  Everyone needs to learn from Babylon 5 here.  J. Michael Straczynski knew precisely where he was going, even if he didn’t know every detail of how he would get there, and even had “trap doors” ready to get rid of any character cleanly in case an actor died or wanted to leave (he ended up utilizing a few of these).  As a result, B5‘s final episode, “Sleeping in Light,” which I’ve previously covered, is a perfect epilogue to the story.

Now, stand-alone dramas and sitcoms are much harder to explain.  Why does an otherwise quality show suddenly go pear-shaped in its final moments?  Laziness is the most frequent culprit with stand-alones, I suspect.  The final episode of Seinfeld, a prime example, reeks of extreme “senioritis,” as if the writing staff was staring at the clock, waiting for the last school day to end so they could just go to college and get laid, already, exclaiming, “who gives a damn what happens to these characters, no one is ever going to watch all the episodes in order!”  This is the only thing that can possibly explain why one of the greatest comedies in television history ends with a clip show and the main characters in jail.  Other times, like with How I Met Your Mother or Star Trek: Voyager, the writers seem to have had a very different set of characters in mind than the audience did, completely misunderstanding their own stories and the way their audience was reacting to them (Admiral Janeway is arguably one of the greatest villains in Star Trek history thanks to her conduct in “Endgame,” so it’s a good thing she goes down with the Borg Unicomplex).  And, of course, there’s always the horrendously unsatisfying (except to teenage viewers) “ultimate wish-fulfillment” final episode, where the writing staff appears to hand the writing chores to a Mary Sue fanfic writer, letting her make all her wildest dreams comes true (which usually means “everyone pairs up in perfect couples like they’re boarding Noah’s ark, and also gets their dream job in another city, so that there’s a reason the series is ending”).  Friends.  Friends, Friends, Friends.  Hell, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine basically did this!

But what about those other last episodes?  You know, the incredibly bizarre ones?  These are my favorite, even though they’re terrible, and basically raping your memories of the show you’ve been watching for years.  Like Quantum Leap‘s sudden turn into a goddamn Twilight Zone of disappearing Russians and quiet introspection after 96 prior episodes of happy-go-lucky adventure?  Or the family friendly Jim Henson puppet-populated sitcom Dinosaurs ending with the entire cast being left to freaking freeze to death as their entire species goes extinct?!  The stranger, out-of-place final episodes seem to be some sort of cracked, poop-flinging moment of “this is the last chance I have to write that deep and introspective character study I’ve always wanted to put out there!” as screamed by the showrunner of ALF.  Like when for absolutely no reason, St. Elsewhere ends with the entire show being revealed to have taken place inside the mind of a random autistic kid (along with a dozen other shows, since St. Elsewhere kept crossing over with other series), as if this is some grand and deep reveal.  …It was just an episodic medical drama!  It was like finding out that Larry and Balki are actually plugged into the Matrix at the end, just because!

…Sorry, I need a moment, I was picturing Bronson Pinchot fighting Morpheus.

The Bob Newhart vehicle, Newhart, did the same thing, in the greatest meta-joke of all time, by ending with the reveal that the entire series took place inside the dreams of Newhart’s character from his earlier sitcom, The Bob Newhart Show.  Blake’s 7 did this, too, but actually pulled it off, probably because it was, admittedly, a serialized story, and had the hairy, hairy balls to take the “what the hell?!” up to 11, ending with everyone dying.  Everyone.  Absolutely everyone.  The show ends with the last surviving character surrounded by enemies, slowly raising his weapon and glaring into the camera.  BAM!  Smash cut to credits over the sound of lasers firing.  Awesome, but still, what the hell, guys?!  Seriously, I have no idea why this is so common.  The “what the hell, it’s the end” instinct is the only thing that makes sense to me here.

At any rate, as we seem to be in a golden age of television at the moment, we can all hope that the showrunners and head writers out there have learned their lesson, and can give us better finishes than this.  But I’d say it’s even money that Game of Thrones ends with Boromir waking up with the Fellowship, shaking Aragorn awake and telling him he had “the strangest dream.”  But for the sake of my oh, so important “warm fuzzies,” I hope they do better.  I need some satisfying conclusions in my life!  …Now, finish the damned books before they catch up to you, George R. R.!

 

New York, NY
May 7, 2014

All the Nerdy Tears

Photo attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/a_t_ljungberg/ / CC BY 2.0

 

Everybody cries, just as much as everybody poops.  It’s usually not for the best reasons.  It could be because you lost a loved one, or you’ve stubbed your toe, or you’ve just realized that the nice supervillain that you work for bought you the Denver Broncos instead of the Dallas Cowboys. But sometimes, letting the waterworks flow is liberating.  It makes you feel alive, even if it’s in a sort of horrible way.  You feel, therefore you are, which can be good.  Pain can be numbing, make everything feel pointless, useless.  A good cry can make it all feel very vital and real, and, in effect, give you a jumping off point to start recovering.  It’s an essential part of grief and coping.  This might explain why there’s an instinct, of sorts, in most people to seek out things that make them sad.

Where does one go when they want to feel sad, and all they have to work with is a remote and a Netflix account?  An episode of a science fiction series usually isn’t the first place you think of.  But, surprise, surprise, some of the most intense television-induced crying sessions around can come at the hands of science fiction and fantasy television.  In fact, it might be the best place to go when you want to feel that way.  I’ve long maintained that the reason shy or socially awkward people are associated with science fiction and fantasy isn’t because liking that type of fiction makes you more likely to have those traits, it’s because that type of fiction speaks to the lonely and shy more than other fiction does.  When your actual reality isn’t very happy at the moment, who wants to think about the real, contemporary world?  Why not escape into a world that is set in the future, or in some other reality?  By that same token, if you’re feeling sad and want to cry because you just lost a pet, or your dream wedding didn’t turn out like you thought it would, won’t watching something that takes place in the contemporary world make all the sadness from your situation, all the “feels,” as the Internets are saying, even stronger?  No, you want to cry by relating to similar pain, not the exact same pain!  Enter sci-fi and fantasy, where you can cry about a really sad breakup between two aliens on a planet in another star system, and not have to consciously relate it to your own situation (even though your subconscious is actually doing just that).

Here’s a good selection to start with.  Bring tissues.

-SPOILERS FOR THE EPISODES IN QUESTION FOLLOW!  SKIP ANY YOU MAY WANT TO WATCH!-

 

Quantum Leap – “M.I.A.” (1990)

Quantum Leap (1989-1993) is a series that many people, sadly, have forgotten about.  In short, it was about a time traveler named Sam Beckett, played by the always affable Scott Bakula, who was stuck travelling through time, replacing specific people at specific times so that he could “put right what once went wrong.”  He was alone, trapped, lost in time, and was forced to help fix other people’s lives, but never his own, in the hopes that he could eventually “leap” home.  It just reeks of sad moments, doesn’t it?  To be sure, there were a lot of tear jerker episodes, but the second season finale “M.I.A.” takes the cake.

Sam’s “observer,” Admiral Al Calavicci, played by Dean Stockwell, Sam’s only companion, who appears to him and only him as a hologram transmitted from the future, fought in the Vietnam War, and was taken as a P.O.W. from 1969 until 1973.  During that time, his wife, Beth, who believed him dead, remarried, leaving the eventually emancipated Al completely destroyed and heartbroken.  During the episode, Sam is dropped into the time period when Al is missing, and in the proximity of Beth.  Al, realizing the opportunity, spends much of the episode lying his head off to Sam about what he is there to do, trying to convince Sam to tell Beth that he’s alive and well and will be home soon.  It doesn’t take Sam long to realize that he isn’t there for Al or Beth, and cannot change their lives.  This leads to one of the most devastating moments in the series, as Al, a holographic projection Beth cannot see or hear, “dances” with Beth as she dances by herself to “their” song, Ray Lewis’ “Georgia,” pleading with her to wait for him, that he’s out there and alive.  Sam, who finishes what he’s actually there to do, leaps out while this is happening, removing Al’s projection from the timeframe, with the episode ending on Beth, dancing alone, and crying for reasons she doesn’t understand, mumbling a quiet “…Al?”

The sadness level of this episode is a bit dulled by the fact that this specific moment and event is revisited in the series finale, “Mirror Image,” three years later, effectively neutering its impact.  But viewed on its own, it’s tremendously sad and powerful.

LEVEL OF FEELS: Your parents just told you that Santa Claus doesn’t exist.

 

Star Trek: The Next Generation – “The Inner Light” (1992)

Everyone knows Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994), and everyone knows this episode.  In fact, the theme from it, played on a solitary flute, ranks among the most well-known pieces of non-title television music in history.

Enterprise encounters a probe that immediately renders Patrick Stewart’s Captain Picard unconscious with some kind of transmission.  When he wakes up, he’s on a planet he’s never seen before, Kataan, and everyone insists that his name is Kamin, and that he’s from there, married, and is recovering from some sort of severe illness that gave him delusions.  Picard is, of course, immediately suspicious, and refuses to believe anything he is being told, but as time passes, he begins to become a part of the world’s society, and even has children, and learns to play a native flute and a specific melody.  As Picard gets older and older, the gravity of the situation on Kataan begins to settle in.  The planet’s sun is becoming more luminous, scorching the surface and bathing the world in ultraviolet radiation.  Everything is dying, and the Kataanian civilization, which is pre-atomic, can’t escape the planet.  Picard, or Kamin, as he’s accepted being over the decades, tries to help in any way he can, but ultimately, at the very end of his life and now a widower, he is helpless to save the world.

One day, “Kamin’s” now adult children take him to watch a mysterious rocket launch, where he sees everyone he’s known over the decades on Kataan young and alive again.  They explain that the rocket is carrying a probe, the probe the Enterprise encountered in space.  The probe is full of the memories and experiences of their world, and will interface with the first sentient mind it finds, giving them a full life on Kataan, and letting them see how the Kataanians met their end, so that someone, anyone, would remember and know who they were.  Picard, finally understanding, sees the rocket launch, and then wakes up on the Enterprise as himself again.  Only 25 minutes have passed.  The probe, which, he is told, originated in a system that went nova a thousand years earlier, is dormant now, and inside it, the crew finds Kamin’s flute.  The episode ends with Picard in his quarters, playing the music he learned in his other “life,” quietly paying respect to an entire world that only he remembers.

This one is an absolute classic, and even won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1993.  If you aren’t at least misting up when Kamin’s wife shows up young and alive again, you’re probably a soulless automaton.

LEVEL OF FEELS: You discover your pet goldfish floating upside-down in its tank when you’re only 8.

 

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – “The Visitor” (1995)

Oh, for the love of Gort, this one.  Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999) has always been the redheaded stepchild of the Star Trek franchise, thanks to being the only series set on a space station instead of on a mobile starship.  I happen to think that worked to its great advantage, since people kept coming to them instead of the other way around, creating a massive cast of secondary and tertiary characters that kept visiting the station.  It really felt like it was part of a big, wide world, and the ship-based shows sometimes didn’t.  DS9 really hit its stride in its third season, and then hit it out of the park in Season Four, starting with this, just the second episode of the season.

The episode opens in the Louisiana bayou, which is definitely a first for the franchise, in the home of a very aged Jake Sisko, the son of the series’ lead, Captain Benjamin Sisko.  A young woman has found his home, desperate to speak to the author of her favorite books, who published just two successful novels and then never wrote again, becoming a recluse.  He begins to tell her his story.

Decades earlier, in the late 24th century world we’re familiar with in the series, Captain Sisko and his son, Jake, are involved in a, shall we say, “timey-wimey” accident while aboard the station’s resident patrol ship, Defiant.  Sisko appears to be vaporized, and disappears into subspace.  His father presumed dead, the 18-year-old Jake struggles to go on with his life, but keeps encountering his father, appearing as he did at the moment of the accident.  At first, no one believes him, but eventually, it is apparent that what Jake is experiencing is real, and that Captain Sisko is popping back into the regular space time continuum periodically for brief stints, effectively frozen in time in-between.  At first, Jake is overjoyed, thinking he can get his father back, but Sisko is never in his reality for long enough, and eventually, his regular appearances become a painful obsession for Jake as he ages.  He loses his wife, gives up on his writing, and becomes an emotionally stunted recluse.  Finally catching back up with the time at the beginning of the story, Jake finishes his tale, revealing that he figured out the exact time his father will appear next, and that this will be the last time he seems him.  He hands a third, unpublished and finished book to the now devastated young woman, asking her to leave.  Sisko appears again, and Jake reveals that he has injected himself with a fatal dose of poison, having realized that he was pulling his father through time like a zipper, and that if his thread were cut, his father might go back to the moment of the accident.  Sisko is horrified, and cradles his now elderly son in his arms as he dies, before suddenly finding himself back on the Defiant some 60 years earlier.  Avoiding the accident this time, Sisko and his son return home, Sisko shaken and astonished at the love his son truly has for him.

This one is sold by Tony Todd‘s heartbreaking performance as the adult and elderly Jake, and Avery Brooks‘ always powerful performance as Captain Sisko.  Rather than filling you with despairing sadness, “The Visitor” hits you with the “other” Jake’s six decade sacrifice, and how beautiful, if almost hopeless, his love for his father was.  If it hadn’t worked out, of course, the feelings it would have elicited would have been far darker.  But such as it is…

LEVEL OF FEELS: Your cat dies of feline AIDS after contracting it from the cheap cat food you kept buying.

 

Babylon 5 – “Sleeping in Light” (1998)

Babylon 5 (1993-1998) was a pioneer in serialized storytelling in American television.  Every show has season or series-long arcs now, but once upon a time, B5 was fairly unique.  Structured like a five act novel, the entire fifth, and final, season acts as a denouement.  And this episode, “Sleeping in Light,” is the whole story’s epilogue, jumping ahead 19 years from the previous, penultimate episode.  Describing the backstory of this one would require describing all five years of the show, so let’s not do that.  And I don’t want to completely spoil this thing.  Briefly put…

John Sheridan, the series’ lead character, is dying, and he knows he is.  20 years earlier, he was brought back to life and told he had a 20 year extension on life.  Time is almost up, and so his wife, Delenn, calls together all of their old friends and comrades for one last meeting.  What follows isn’t another episode of the series, in the traditional sense.  It’s more like attending a long wake for an old friend.  We see Sheridan say goodbye to everyone one last time, then goodbye to his wife in an utterly heartbreaking scene.  He goes on one last “Sunday drive,” as he calls it, on his own, visiting the Babylon 5 station again.  The station, too, is at the end of its life, all but abandoned and about to be decommissioned.  Its mission is over, and now it’s just a giant navigational hazard.

Finally, Sheridan returns to the Coriana System, where the Shadow War ended 20 years earlier, where he was supposed to return at the end, and finds Lorien, the ancient alien that brought him back to life, waiting for him there.  The death scene that follows is incredibly unique by television standards, as Sheridan quietly, peacefully, sadly faces his end, and Lorien engulfs him in light (with mysterious implications).  Smiling, Sheridan utters his last words, “well, look at that…The sun’s coming up,” and disappears.

Then, just to put another knife in the audience, we get to see the surviving characters assemble one last time to say goodbye to the station itself, as it’s shut down (by the show’s creator, J. Michael Straczynski, in a cameo, no less), and then blown up in slow motion as a crescendo of sad but triumphant music plays!

…And then we get to see everyone moving on with their lives, except Delenn, who, it is said, watches the sun come up by herself every morning for the rest of her life.  The show actually ends on Delenn reaching out to the sun, with the shot fading to white.  Gah!  Excuse me, there’s something in my eye.

Bruce Boxleitner and Mira Furlan hit it out of the park here, as Sheridan and Delenn, respectively, but the emotions mean a lot more if you’ve watched the show from the beginning.  By itself, though, the scenes with Delenn and Sheridan should still bring a tear to your eye.  But watching that station go up just kills you if you watched the whole series.

LEVEL OF FEELS: You find out that your mom was a porn star in the ’70s with the stage name “Breastzilla.”

 

Doctor Who – “Doomsday” (2006)

Oh, God.  God!  This show.  This damned show.  Doctor Who (1963-1989, 1996, 2005-Present) is ostensibly a “family” science fiction show, and yes, it can feel a bit childish at times.  But for a family show, people sure die a lot!  I’m serious, this show has a higher body count than Hannibal Lecter.  People get vaporized, blown out of airlocks, mutilated by cybernetic monsters, absorbed into fat alien creatures, dropped off of buildings, shot, stabbed, drowned, dissected…  You name it, they’ve killed it.  The show even lampshades it, with The Doctor exclaiming in the episode “The Doctor Dances,” “just this once, everybody lives!”

So, yes, you’ll frequently be devastated by the deaths of characters, including The Doctor himself, who periodically “dies” and is reborn, or “regenerated,” thanks to a species-specific quirk.  But the show isn’t content to just break your heart that way.  Oh, no.  It gets creative.  Honestly, picking just one episode from this thing was a tall order, with the last part of “The War Games,” the last part of “The Hand of Fear,” “Father’s Day,” “The Family of Blood,” “Journey’s End,” the second part of “The End of Time,” and “The Angels Take Manhattan” all being worthy contenders.  But a lot of those require pre-existing investment in the series.  Let’s go with the most obvious one, the one that anyone will cry to the ending of.  The finale of the rebooted series’ Series Two, “Doomsday.”

What precedes the ending is irrelevant here.  All you need to know is that Rose, The Doctor’s companion, has been travelling with The Doctor for years, and is clearly in love with him (despite him being a nigh-immortal alien), and he’s clearly in love with her, and they are just the best together.  At the end of this episode, Rose gets stuck in a parallel universe through a series of very complicated events.  Suffice to say, she’s stuck there, there’s no way back, The Doctor can’t get to her.  That’s bad enough, right?

Oh, no.  No, no, no.  See, some time later, Rose starts hearing The Doctor calling to her in her sleep, telling her to go to a specific place.  So she goes, and finds a projection of The Doctor waiting for her on a beach in Alternate Norway.  They can’t touch, only talk, and they only have minutes before the last cracks in the universe close.  Rose has made a life for herself in her new home, but is destroyed that The Doctor is going to be alone again.  Breaking down, she finally says “I love you.”  I swear, this is what actually happens next.  First, he pulls a damned Han Solo:

ROSE: I… I love you.

THE DOCTOR: Quite right, too.

And then, and then:

THE DOCTOR: And I suppose, if it’s my last chance to say it…  Rose Tyler-

AND THEN HE DISAPPEARS.  Cracks closed, they’ll never see each other again.  God!

Billie Piper as Rose and David Tennant as The Doctor do a great job here, and effectively kill you, assuming you have a romantic bone in your body.  Even if you have just a small one, it will suffice.  You will be dead.  Now, the hilarious scene that immediately follows, ending the episode, serves as a bit of a sadness killjoy, as do events from Series Four.  But on its own?  God, it hurts!

LEVEL OF FEELS: Your entire family just burned to death in a gigantic orphanage fire that was started when you were trying to give a Viking funeral to your cat that died of feline AIDS that you gave it by feeding it bad cat food.

 

New York, NY
March 11, 2014