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Dexter: New Blood: Sins of the Father (2022)
A great ending
It's a minority opinion to state as such, but I think given the state of affairs in New Blood, the ending made a lot of sense. Meaning, if this show had a proper ending with him getting caught it should've been in Season 8, but now with the addition of Harrison, there's another ending on the table as well.
I personally think the ending we got works for a few reasons.
1 - Dexter getting Harrison involved in his business was him stepping outside of any justification for any moral argument you can make for him. Getting his kid to become a criminal and a serial killer is child abuse, and a level of insanity I don't think we've ever really seen from Dex.
2 - Dex's damage to Harrison, both from involving him in his "work" and from abandoning him needs to be paid back to Harrison in the currency of independence and fresh start.
3 - Killing Logan sealed the deal. Any moral version of the code should require that should an innocent person stand in his way of freedom he himself should take the fall and get arrested. By not doing so the code becomes completely a selfish endeavor. And I think that's what it's revealed to be, and I like the shock of seeing another side of Dexter we almost never got to see. A darker, but also truer side. It's a dynamic choice and makes the character feel more dimensioned.
Thus, given these three reasons, the logical and most symbolic gesture would be to have Dexter die by the hands of Harrison, who is granted a fresh start.
Is this better than the ending we all wanted? Maybe not, after all there's that satisfaction we were all after. But then again, we've already kind of gotten that story three times; once in season 2, 7, and New Blood(not counting single episodes that dangle the threat of him getting caught). And at this point, I think this is almost more interesting. It's artsy, it's emotional, and I like that the focus isn't on Dexter, he's done enough damage, and it stops now with Harrison.
I'm not addressing any plot holes or the fact that the show lead us to believe that it was going in the widely preferred direction. And given what we got, I actually would have preferred that Dexter got murdered, as opposed to an assisted suicide. Still, it's a minor thing. I want to restate that had the show been different the death penalty ending would have been the only option, but it's in this way with this particular character Harrison ultimately at the heart of it.
The Flash: A New World, Part 4: Finale (2023)
Depressingly mediocre
The Flash's series finale is precisely what you'd expect from a story that has consistently underdelivered for years on end. It presents a hackneyed conclusion that display "fun" fight scenes that are resolved quickly and treats the villains from the older(better) seasons with short encounters with side characters, while Barry takes on a new villain that is at least slightly compelling if not also rushed and two dimensional. What follows is a half hour of kisses and goodbye, and some questionable decisions.
This story was once good. It had emotion, mystery, and a sort of cheesy charisma that was its own. The acting and the characters were almost always subpar, but within the context of the CW network, they were better than good enough. The second half of the show becomes this robotic and irrelevant sequence of poorly rendered external obstacles for the flat characters to move up against. This finale, as I've stated, falls within the second half. What's curious though about the shows decay, is that the problems spread not just through the artificial writing, but has infected the performances, making them bland, and then somehow the CGI too. I'm sure there are other factors involved, creative and budgetary, but this story has found itself in a position where it is no longer a functional narrative, and is in error on every level, and this finale has this all on full display. Damn you, Eric Wallace, not even The Flash could catch you.
Mr. Robot (2015)
Goodbye, Friend
The series has meant so much to me. When I finished it, I cried until my face felt as though it were swollen. It was not so much that anything sad happened in the end, but more so that I was forced to say goodbye to these characters at this point in my life. I'll revisit them again, maybe in five years or so, when my own experience has changed enough to inform my experience differently, but for now, this is Goodbye, Friend. I decided now that I want to do a thorough expression of my thoughts and feelings of the show, an earned farewell. So, here I go:
The series explores the extent to which modernity encourages maladaptive behavior because of an artificial environment interacting with primal life, and attempts to communicate the experience of the dissonance between fulfillment and whatever the particularities of a character are that drive them at any given point in the series. With one character it might be a struggle between status and vacancy in corporate America, with another it might be narrowly defining yourself in a strict belief system and not having any sense of self to hold on to when you change, with another it might be loneliness with the potentially excessive presence of social media-all of these work to give love, life and logic to the architecture of the characters. The characters inner and outer lives narratively intersect when they attempt to correct their pain by working against the socioeconomic factors that contribute to them, to the corrupt imbalance of wealth and power. The "saving the world" never brings about the desired clarity, forcing a character to either continue distorting their identity, or to try and change themselves, and help change others of the trauma acquired, and to begin to search for an authentic identity. -
To communicate the search for meaning in an artificial model, the story uses technology as a an analogy. A viewer encounters this almost immediately at the story's title, "Mr. Robot", which although turns out to be a character, the name and it's flashy red title red card that we see at the beginning of every episode, functions as a metaphor for anhedonic responses to trauma, or something not resembling a human within the subtext of social norms, which once more forces the viewer and the characters to consider possibilities of what it means to be truly human, and the ironic title of a robot and it's implications, artfully hangs over the characters lives like a heavy drape.
The show also does this with coding methods and mechanisms, expressing compelling similarities through something like a Kernel Panicked, an operating system who's function is to detect an inner fatal error in which either it is unable to safely recover or continue to run a system because it would have a higher risk of major data loss, as a parallel to the sunk cost nature of depression or addiction. The series does this through voice overs and episode titles, with which my favorite example of is the first ten episodes of season fours titles, all in perfect order, refer to the members of the HTTPS 400 family status codes errors, with every title working to provide insight and ambiguity. In 404 not found, an error code users face when attempting to access a webpage that does not exist, has been moved, or has a dead or broken link, functions as a metaphor for a group of characters lost in the woods, while another group drives home with a clear destination that turns out to be false, all the while to show dimensions of the characters loss in their respected sense of selfs, making their destination have a sort of cerebral catharsis.
Of the thematic elements, the ones at the center of the story workings towards identity are the ones that will keep the series living in me long after I have finished it. The idea of an identity forming around a defense mechanism, and that identity staying long enough where it is expressed in harmful ways, Ie., addiction for an almost pathological emptiness, or dissociation from trauma, these responses serve to protect and shield us from the outside world, yet sometimes they may stay long enough, where they begin to overtake and change a person long enough where they might identity with them. An addict for instance, might further collapse into chaos if they don't wish to consider the root of their addiction. These become a divorce from our constantly changing authentic selves, and the change to correct our displacement, to accept the trauma and escape from under it as a survivor, allows us to live as happier, more fulfilled people, as the trauma may actually prevent growth. The series protagonist is angry, the parts of himself that function as a protector are the parts that over take him in subtle ways; his anger to society, his anger to himself and others, this is helpful to an extent, but, the anger stays and is focused on long enough to where it defines him, and to where it's focus becomes actually changing the world. But the series reveals there is no utopia, no magic machines that change the world into some self desired heaven, or to transport us to one, a belief in the case of the characters, is simply another form of displacement staying long after it is useful. A possible antidote is an acceptance of the difference between who you are with this displacement, and an investigation as to why it's there, and what it's protecting, and how you can ultimately start following the crumbs back to an authentic self. The series concludes then, the only real way to change the world, is to help others, with smaller achievable deeds, as a pursuit to help others and oneself, is changing the world.
What sets the series apart from other profound explorations into arenas of meaning, is it's unique aesthetic quality. I once said that the more stylistically concentrated a piece was, the more likely it was that it were masking for a lack of substance, in the context of this story however, the style earns its novelty through achieving a mesmeric constellation of consistently exceptional frames, edits, and a powerful soundtrack, achieving a new experimental style. What further makes it stand out among other masterpieces is it's particular model of story; heavily plotted, with an abundance of twists. This is unusual for high quality stories as a primary objective of a piece exploring meaning, would and should treat plot as a background, with sharp, clearly defined yet ambiguous characters filling the frame. Take a look at some of the greatest shows in the history of the medium; Madmen, Better Call Saul, Succession, The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under, etc, all of these works have a single thing in common, their characters aren't objects moving through a story, they are the story, their experience is the engagement, and their every day, mundane struggles, brought out to be transcendent realities, are their conflict. Filling the glass with plot seems, in regard to the art of the form, counterintuitive, as it dilutes the real estate for meaning with the finite nature of a plotted narrative, and the dense, heavily stylized aesthetic, shows Mr Robot has two symptoms of a limited story, yet it's plot somehow manages to be precisely the thing that sets it apart from the other high art shows I mentioned above. The twists and conflicts in Mr Robot, are executed with such a thoughtful grace, with such a textured ingenuity, so that it feels that when you are hit with a twist that changes the landscape of the story, while also explaining aspects of the story a viewer otherwise assumed would be passively treated, a wave of goosebumps forces itself over the viewer, and when there is conflict, it is true, not in the flat, all collapsing nature, but in the unique collision of unexpected factors, creating a totally novel fear, morbidity, anxiety, and to an extent that the viewer has never experienced these things before, or more precisely, these dimensions and flavors of them. If you want an intelligent story that concurrently earns its biggest moments, there is nowhere else to look for, and those moments and characters will live on in my heart as long as I do.