Season Finale: Left Wanting More?

Our resident reviewer Beth rides in again to give us her less than enthusiastic take on the season 3 finale. 

If I had to sum up the season 3 finale in one word, it would be an indifferent “Meh”.

There were some good moments and the actors all lived up to the high standards we expect, but rather than an explosive episode that leaves me drooling for next season, “Brazil” was more like a music video. It struck me as a bunch of loosely-related scenes that could be set to some forgettable 80’s pop song. Nothing was fleshed out or explained and it really didn’t have enough excitement to justify being a finale.

Let’s start with the suicide attack that Weaver and crew launched. It could have been exciting. It should have been, but it was ditched like a bad prom date and instead of any action we got a deus ex machina in the form of the Volm. Weaver just strolls into camp with a “Yeah, we were kinda screwed and about to die and then we got rescued. Sooo, who’s got a spare drum I can beat while everyone dances around a fire and passes booze around?”

The Volm are not entirely trustworthy and had a shady plan for humanity. Who knew? Well, anyone who watched the show and has a healthy sense of skepticism. Thank God Professor Mason was ready with one of his patented passionate speeches about humanity and its resilience and love of freedom! Cochise’s old man was rocked to his core, but can he honestly never have encountered a race that would rather die than be captive? I can’t help but think he would have been better off offering the group relocation to somewhere nicer, like Hawaii or Colorado. Who wouldn’t go for a nice timeshare in the mountains? Anywhere but Brazil. Anyway, Cochise Sr. wandered off to think about the whole concentration camp thing, leaving Tom to sit there and look handsome and brooding which seemed to be his role in this episode. Oh well. There are worse things to be.

Meanwhile back at camp, Weaver has a heart attack. Turns out, he’s been having chest pain for a couple of months. There was absolutely no reason for that scene except to set up something extremely predictable for next season. More on that later. In other camp news, Lourdes is tied up and doing her best Linda Blair impression. She’s growling, snorting, rolling her eyes, and generally looking like she needs an old priest and a young priest. Seems totally safe to keep letting people touch her, right? So that’s what Hal does. It’s not like eye bugs can be transmitted from one person to another. He leans right on in there, brushes her hair away from her face, and talks about the good old days (“Remember when you had a crush on me and I used to ignore you and make fun of you with Karen? Good times, good times!”) while Maggie stands outside stroking her rifle and looking like she could go for a good old-fashioned Lourdes hunt. When she mentions that they may have to send Lourdes to that big medical school in the sky Hal responds by asking why. Really, Hal? Well, no reason, except for the fact that she’s a murderer infected with highly-contagious bugs that could destroy the whole camp.

The Volm quickly return Tom before he can inflict another speech on them, and it turns out that Cochise Sr. has decided to let the humans go. Free-range humans. Hannibal Lecter would approve. The group happily hits the road, Dr. Kadar gets to say something endearingly nerdy, but before anyone gets a chance to start the first of many rounds of “100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” Karen shows up. I have never been so happy to see Karen. I knew she would relieve the tedium and she sure did. At last we got an exciting scene. I was ready to buy her a nice Hickory Farms gift basket, but Tom went and shot her first. Let’s stop and dwell on that. Tom wouldn’t kill the inbred hillbilly family that tried to murder his sons just a few short weeks ago, but he gutshoots Karen without even listening to see if she has something important to say about the Volm? He seems to leap between bleeding heart and warrior as the writers need him to and that’s just bad writing.

Hal, once again earning the Dumb Jock nickname Ben gave him, kneels over Karen’s dying body, getting close enough for another eye worm or for her to break his neck, but my girl Mags come to the rescue. Two bullets later Hal is left staring up at Maggie (the woman he supposedly loves, remember?) with wounded eyes like she’d just shot his beloved golden retriever instead of the psycho broad who’d tortured his father, infected him, and tried to re-harness his little brother.

In the worst news of the entire series, Dr. Chewtoy and the creepazoid are alive. The creepazoid has left the pupal stage and is full-on insect now. She hugs Tom who looks at her like a cockroach crawling up his leg. He clearly does not remember the “newborn-to-kindergarten-in-two-weeks” stage that all kids go through.

There’s one more scene to go before putting this season to bed. Tom asks Dr. Kadar if the brat will continue to age rapidly and the good doctor does not know. Apparently, he was sick the day they taught that class in nuclear physics school. Maggie and Hall quarrel over who gets to pack stuff into a truck. This ends with Maggie basically telling Hal to go pack his stuff elsewhere and we leave them with a soulful glance that warns us that more soap opera is afoot for next season.

Lourdes is stuffed into a dog crate in the back of a truck when the creepy brat strolls up, removes all the eye worms, and smiles up at Tom, who is looking like he wished he’d remembered condoms on that fateful night she was conceived. So do I, Tom. So do I. I’m pretty sure Weaver will have a massive heart attack next season and the brat will save him with some magical healing powers juuuust as he’s about to exit this world. Or possibly Maggie’s cancer returns as I’ve been predicting since the first season and the creepazoid smiles sweetly down at her, touches her, and she’s healed. Either way, boring and predictable as the whole baby plotline has been since the beginning.

I’m not sure where they’re going with this show, but if this episode did nothing else at least it gets the 2^nd Mass moving again. I don’t think Karen is dead. I see the creepazoid dying of old age (please) unless the Volm heal her at the last minute. Hal and Maggie will be well and truly broken up by the beginning of the next season and we’ll be treated to yet another season of that subplot. Possibly in the interim Hal will fool with Lourdes and we’ll get a high school love triangle. Gaaaaack.

To end with a positive note, it looks like Mary Sue Denny is in a rocky tomb somewhere under Charleston and good riddance.

All in all, this episode was fully anti-climactic. At the very least, an important character from the 2^nd Mass should have died somewhere along the line. No one but Crazy Lee died this season and she was very much background.

 

I don’t know what next season is going to bring, but it looks like yet another season of DVRing episodes and reading the synopses before deciding whether or not to watch.

 

~ by The Falling Skies Blog on August 5, 2013.