Justin and Faraday have found Newton deep in the jungle and he has a plan.

A few spoilers.

I suppose it was too much to ask.

For over two months now, I have been banging on about the tangy, pungent smorgasbord that is The Man Who Fell to Earth, constantly veering from genre to genre, the story pinging off in all directions, never quite making sense, but somehow being rather enjoyable. All it needed was for those disparate strands to come together and make some kind of coherent sense in its final act.

Better to travel in hope than to arrive, and all that, but the series finale managed to be far more disappointing than even I had feared. None of the strands was resolved satisfactorily.

Starting with the least important, the Succession style patricidal dynastic soap opera didn’t have any kind of resolution aside from an inconsequential scene between the excellent Rob Delaney and Sonya Cassidy as the warring Flood siblings. Delaney’s role in the drama had fizzled out during the last episode so after building him up so beautifully, Hatch’s story went absolutely nowhere. A waste of a character and of an actor.

The CIA tech thriller made no sense whatsoever. Back in the mid 1990s I produced a radio drama for the BBC called Deep Station Emerald where a research team who discover a source of naturally occurring cold fusion are bumped off one by one by agents of the petrochemical industry. That made complete sense thirty years ago. But these days? I struggle to believe that anyone would have a problem with the successful development of limitless fusion in the mid twenty-first century. There’s so much money to be made in re-structuring our tech and distributing the power, it’s basically win-win for everyone, especially technologically advanced countries like the USA. The politics of this strand are horribly out of date, and irritatingly paranoid (as opposed to dramatically paranoid). At the last minute there is an attempt to make it more about quantum computing but that seemed to come from absolutely nowhere, and again… your problem is?

Lastly, there was the whole alien invasion thing, which ought to have been the CIA’s main preoccupation – and one I had some sympathy with – but for some reason, the spooks couldn’t seem to concentrate on that at all… possibly because this strand’s main function was as a heavy handed metaphor for colonialism, capitalism and racism.

Oh yes, and then there was some more cheesy drivel about being human and love and family and apple pie.

Okay, I’m being unfair. They didn’t mention apple pie.

Verdict: There has been much to enjoy over the last ten weeks, but the creatives behind this series really needed to pick a style; to pick a single coherent narrative and stick with it. If there were to be a second season, I would certainly want to check it out, but it would need to demonstrate that they had learned how to draw their ideas together and not just rely on the conviction and commitment of their central players to paper over the many cracks in the overall concept. 5/10

Martin Jameson