Endings

Chuck really has to come back next season. NBC Universal, please renew the show because I have to see what its like now that Bartowski will be able to hold his own in a fight!

This was hopefully a season finale and not a series finale but, if it was, then I think the writers did good. This year has seen the end, or possible end, of several shows I watch and the writers impressed me with quality finales. In this regard, compared to past seasons this has to be one of the best–though for the most part I’d have rather had more episodes.

Battlestar Galactica, The Wire, The Shield, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Life, MI-5, these are the ones I’m thinking about. The L Word was close but not quite at the same level; they did at least finally get back to the whole Jenny’s murder thing in the last episode. Life and Sarah Connor, at least as of this writing, are only on the bubble and not cancelled, though the latter seems sure to go.

There was plenty of criticism of the way Ron Moore brought the four year flight to an end. Almost everyone loved the first hour but the second not so much. I felt it was great that all the main character arcs and nearly all the questions were answered. I specifically wanted to know what the Six that only Baltar and the Baltar only Six could see were, and we got that answer. My main quibble was that the very last bit, with the two angels walking down a Manhattan street, was a ham-handed method of getting a point across.

The Wire, as I wrote a few months ago, gave us a “final season of an awesome show [of] 10 episodes that layered on the death of the American big city newspaper to a stack of stories that were already deeper than the aggregate total of the 500+ episodes of the three editions of CSI” and I like the CSIs. This was, quite possibly, the finest show produced by American television.

The Shield was another great one, very bleak (as were BSG and The Wire), but like them it ended and did so honestly within the framework created over its run. The sight of Vic Mackie forced to sit quietly at a cubicle desk for years to come was a terrific way to punish and reward the atrocious behavior we’d seen.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles finished at a point that let the creatives go forward if the show is renewed–try figuring out how they were going to explain John Connor’s trip forward and how and/or why he would come back to the present–or if not gave viewers a sense of one major part of his life coming to a close.

Let’s just hope the NBC execs have the good judgment to bring back Chuck and Life.