Finale

Jaime Weinman on the end of Walter White

Just a quick filler clip while I’m working on something else: many new shows this TV season will fail, and some of them will go off the air after 13 episodes. But it’s a bet that none of them will end their 13th and last episode like I Married Dora, a 13-episode flop from the late ’80s. It was one of the most unusual eras of U.S. network TV and certainly the era most awash in meta-humour, but even regular viewers of Moonlighting (on the same network) were a little surprised to see this show end like this, with no warning whatsoever:

The season finale did what every teacher of drama says you shouldn’t do: it was all climaxes

I’ll admit it: I have trouble understanding what happened on Lost last night, even after it’s explained to me and recapped in detail. That’s the pact Lost makes with the viewers: if you follow us throughout the season, we will deliver some big thrills in the finale (and big ratings, though less big than they used to be) but if you don’t watch regularly, and just tune in not entirely sure of who’s doing what and where and when and why, then you will be confused. That’s not actually true of all serialized shows. 24 is a serial, but if you drift in and out during the season, it will still sort of make sense, because while it has a lot of twists, the actual plot is not that complicated and the episodes will usually find some way to remind us of what the basic conflicts are. The situations are clear. Lost is a serialized show where the situations are not supposed to be clear, where we’re supposed to argue about what’s going on.