first season finales: the killing and game of thrones

One thing about being a blogger who lives on the West Coast is that by the time I see a television show, most of the critics have already had their say. It’s their job to put material out there, and they see the episodes before me. At times, this means I’ll have formulated some thoughts, only to find that someone else has already said it.

More often than not, that someone else is Alan Sepinwall. Alan’s beaten me again, this time regarding The Killing. I’ll add a couple more of my own thoughts, but first, here’s what Alan thought of the season finale … note that I have no argument with anything he says here:

"Orpheus Descending" itself is a mess, and an insult to the audience who have stuck around for the last three months. …

So this will be the last review I write of "The Killing," because this will be the last time I watch "The Killing." Because I have no interest in going forward with a show that treats its audience this way. …

[T]o pull the rug out from under one last time, in grander fashion than ever before? On a show that many viewers have lost complete and total faith in? On a show where even the supportive reviews and comments have had an undercurrent of, "Let's wait for the finale; I'm sure there's a plan to all of this" to them? That's as colossal and unpleasant a miscalculation in a TV season finale as I can remember.

Actually, I don’t have anything to add, I just have a different way of saying it. A series that began with great promise, an atmospheric setting, and some fine acting ended up being a shaggy-dog story with an atmospheric setting and some fine acting. Fuck it, I’m with Alan. Robin can watch Season Two by herself, if she’s so inclined.

It’s an insult to the greatness of Game of Thrones that I’m writing about both shows in the same post. Game of Thrones could be subtitled, “HBO Does It Again.” I am not the only person who came to Game of Thrones thinking “that’s not the kind of thing I like.” Some people stopped right there, and didn’t bother to watch at all. Me, I figured HBO had earned a little of my time and patience. And it was rewarding indeed. Game of Thrones is filled with great characters and terrific acting, and if the storytelling was a bit hard to follow at times for someone like me who hasn’t read the books, well, I mostly got the drift, and as good as the narratives are, it often didn’t matter if I was confused … individual scenes sparkled. Game of Thrones creates a brand new world, and if I hedged my bets because fantasy isn’t for me, I was proven wrong. In fact, the fantastic element is precisely what allows for a world different from our own, recognizably human but always with the potential for things outside of our real-world experiences. The closest HBO show to Game of Thrones, I think, is Rome. In that series, humans acted in ways that seemed very odd to us, because it took place so long ago, attitudes were different, beliefs were different … in other words, the world of Rome was as fantastic to a modern audience as is the world of Game of Thrones.

So, grades … people seem to like it when I give grades. After the first two episodes of The Killing, I was in the B+/A- range. But I’d give the finale a D, and the season as a whole a C-. I won’t be back. As for Game of Thrones, when it began, I wrote, “It has the potential to be one of the top series of its time. Having said that, at the moment, I’d probably only call it the second-best TV series on Sunday nights, after The Killing.” Boy, did I get that wrong. Grade for Season One: A.

Comments

[Steven Rubio]

I wrote the above before I had a chance to read Mo Ryan's take on the finale of The Killing. Holy shit, she's on fire!

http://www.aoltv.com/2011/06/19/the-killing-season-1-season-finale-recap/

I hated the season finale of 'The Killing' with the burning intensity of 10,000 white-hot suns.

It wasn't just a bad ending to a poorly constructed, sloppy, disappointing season. It was a jaw-dropping instance of a show not just squandering its promise, but betraying its viewers. The tone-deaf arrogance of the writers and executives responsible for 'The Killing' is simply astonishing. And depressing, if you're a fan of quality television....

This hour was, in my opinion, the worst season finale of all time, because it was a terrible execution of a set of colossally stupid, misguided and condescending ideas. And clearly, people at the network have known about what would be in the finale for some time. They should have stopped it. All of it....

A good season finale will set up tantalizing ideas for what may go down when the show returns. This astoundingly awful, obnoxious finale just threw a bunch of crap at the wall and purposely left viewers in the dark about a vast number of things.

[Divinity]

Having read the books, you already know that the only surprises that Game of Thrones held for me were how they would adapt for the medium and boyoboy I've loved every bit of it but it's been ree-DONK-ulously hard to bite my tongue and wait for Dany's finale scene. As @ProgGrrl tweeted at the close of the Eastern feed,"Muthafrakkin' dragons for the win, y'all" Every episode arc has ended EXACTLY where I would have closed it. Whether that is the genius of George RR Martin's narrative or the collective genius of the screenwriters, where The Killing's finale has in some ways disrespected its audience, GoT has done full tribute to its readership.

Oh and if you thought characters were hard to track in this one... ;)

[Steven Rubio]

I thought of you, and all of the other fans of the books, after the penultimate episode, with that WTF Ned Stark ending. We appreciate your silence :-).

[Divinity]

As I told my rather distraught non-reader friend last week, Martin has "good" characters, "smart" characters, and then he has the survivors. Ned was simply too good to live.