minor spoilers

Flynne tries to save her world…

I’m cross. Really cross. And the further I get from having watched this finale the angrier I’m becoming. I may, at some point, simply burst. If so, please note that I wish it were otherwise while you wipe my remains off the plastic tablecloth.

I’m cross because what I’ve just watched wasn’t a finale. All my worries from episode 7 have come to land with the loud screeching horns and thunderous rubber tyres involved in crash landing a hundred-ton turkey.

What we have is an extended intro to a possible season 2. What we have is characters making stupid out of character decisions to further the plot. What we have is a beautifully constructed story devolving into a by the numbers piece of nonsense where people survive being shot because it makes good drama, where cars are hit by trains because someone forgets how to open a door. I mean, what? Just for reference, modern cars make it impossible to lock a car door when your keys are INSIDE. I wasn’t just shaking my head at this; I was throwing my lunch at the screen in disgust.

If these kinds of bad decision-making for the sake of arriving at a certain plot outcome were all that were wrong I could perhaps grumble and carry on.

The real problem here is they are not. They are there in the service of something greater (or lesser depending on how you look at it). These poor decisions are there because the showrunners clearly want a season 2 and that season 2 is not going to be related in any way to Gibson’s sequel, Agency.

Worse yet we have Flynne abandoning her brother to death in a nuclear conflagration in order to kill someone else. This is the same Flynne whose overriding concern for most of the show has been to protect those she loves. She loves them so much she walks away when they’re to be murdered just to get revenge… yes, she decides on revenge before the crime’s committed rather than tackle the attempted crime.

It is utterly baffling and a betrayal of her entire character up to this point.

I was worried at the end of Episode 7 that we’d have the equivalent of an epilogue here and that is largely the case. Every main character has a moment where their lives are essentially summed up with a cliffhanger.

I haven’t come across such comprehensively cynical and careless writing in quite some time. These characters mattered in the first few episodes. Now they’re just people on my television doing things that no longer have any impact because the stakes have been frittered away in favour of prolonging the story.

All of the class commentary rendered meaningless.

All of the commentary about technology’s impact on society abandoned because Flynne decides to kill someone who hasn’t yet killed her loved ones and in so doing abandons them to certain death (and not just them but everyone she’s ever truly known).

All the world building lost in favour of plot armour and the requirement for people to do things established earlier on as impossible.

It’s not simply that the story of the source material has been so clearly abandoned – it’s more that in trying to create something that could run to multiple seasons we’ve instead been delivered a trashing of everything that came before.

Verdict: It is not a good outcome at all.

Rating? 4 stubs out of 10.

Stewart Hotston