Friday 14 August 2015

Television: 'Parks and Recreation: One Last Ride' and 'The Mentalist: Brown Shag Carpet / White Orchids' (The Finales)

Grand series finales are tremendously difficult things to pull off successfully. Of all the television shows I've seen, I can only really think of 'All Good Things...' (from 'Star Trek: The Next Generation') as an example of a finale that excels and in which a whole series successfully culminates. There are examples of finales that work, but don't excel, as in 'Frasier', 'Cheers', 'Magnum PI' and examples of those that don't, for which 'Quantum Leap' is surely a suitably awkward poster boy, along with 'MASH' and 'The Prisoner'. So few series survive long enough to get a finale, that any experience of making one must be incredibly limited.

Where do the finales for 'Parks and Recreation' and 'The Mentalist' fall in this tiny spectrum, then? Unavoidably, they end up being awkward, and bearing the burden of being lesser than the penultimate instalments of the shows. This happens a lot.

'One Last Ride' sets out to be a distillation of the characters' future instead of the series' humour, and finally ends by reducing everyone's fates to predictable or mundane versions of what might have been. Ultimately, it is my own axe to grind, but why reduce every character to making the same life choices? Why not have some people be different? These are characters that have lived their screen lives being different! Oh, that's not fair. Becoming governor of Indiana is not mundane, but it is predictable for Leslie Knope, and Garry being a good mayor was a surprise. Actually, it wasn't a surprise, the man is a born diplomat. The preceding episode, where Garry was chosen as interim mayor, was for me the true finale. It seemed like a natural ending, and that 'One Last Ride' was a postscript of little interest. C'est la vie. We all choose our own natural episodes to finish on. Overall, it's a solid hour, but one that feels very jumpy and disconnected.

What about 'The Mentalist'? This show fared a little better, even while being in the same situation of being given a surprise extra half season to wrap up a show that had already been given an emergency finale at the end of the previous season, one of many impromptu finales given throughout the run of the show. The last two half seasons of 'The Mentalist' were very curious things, coming as an epilogue to the end of the main arc, and leaving us without the drive that Patrick Jane's quest for vengeance had previously provided. Instead, we got no replacement arc except for the long delayed romance between the two lead characters, Jane's adaptation to regular existence, and a sense of languidness and tranquility. However, it was nice tranquility, and perhaps the correct way to go. A wedding, a serial killer taken care of with ease, and no real danger. Was it good? Well, it failed on the grounds of not representing the series as a whole, and succeeded in tying up loose ends and leaving strands for the future. Every finale should leave a sense that the story continues past what we see of it, at least in my idealised version of narrative fiction. Every story should begin and finish 'en media res', in some way.

Neither of these finales truly feels 'right', or like a true and surpassing symbol of their series as a whole. 'Brown Shag Carpet / White Orchids' does work a lot better than the other, even if it does feel a little too slight. As said previously, these finale episodes are really difficult to make. Getting to a level of coherence when you have to end everything is a miracle in itself.

Goodbye, 'Parks and Recreation' and 'The Mentalist'. You were my last running current television series. What will happen now? Oooh, some books! Excellent...

O.

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