Oh. k. Well. At least they didn’t kill anyone?
This is exactly what I was afraid the finale would be. 38 minutes. 38 tiny little stupid minutes they gave themselves. And it’s not even really 38 minutes, because a couple of the minutes are “last week on.” This felt like a Cliff’s Notes version of what the finale could’ve been. I suppose the pacing during The Present half of the finale was fine. Let’s just hit replay on this to go through it … It starts with Tayo recovering from his almost-murder, and then giving Poet the backstory of his dad’s death and his motivation for joining the FBI. Tayo and Poet then team up to try to find the people who hired the hitman to stab him, which gives more of the Poet/Tayo interactions I’ve been looking for in the Present era of the timeline.
The next scene gives a pretty good explanation from Tayo’s boss about the deal with the devil he’s gonna have to make in order to take over as Director when the boss retires. It’s pretty fucked up, but given what Tayo’s been through, we can believe that he’d be willing to make that terrible deal in order to gain the power he thinks he needs to make change. Tayo then tells Vivian what he plans to do, and per usual, Vivian knows what’s best, telling him that the only reason he’s being given this offer is to shut him up and get him to fall in line. She’s right, as always, but Tayo is a hard-headed fool and tells her he’s taking the deal anyway. She then tells him she can’t take the nonsense anymore and she’s leaving him, and he basically says “fine, go then.” If only he’d listened to Vivian at literally every turn, all of this insanity could’ve been avoided.
And right after the Tayo/Vivian break-up, we get the Poet/Hour break-up. Poet comes off pretty condescending here, but I guess in her defense, it doesn’t seem like Hour has given her much of a heads-up prior to this about how she’s been feeling about the evolution of the AI system. It appears that Poet is taken by surprise, because in her mind, the system is working like gangbusters; it just solved one of her major cases, after all. So when Hour blows up at her here, she’s quite shocked. Thrown off guard, Poet claps back with some very hurtful barbs about Hour being pushed to the sideline and trying to force Poet to choose between her and Tayo, which isn’t true. It’s a bad combo of Hour waiting too long to voice her concerns to Poet and Poet not understanding the implications of the technology.
It’s kinda crazy that in the next scene, we get Amos already being fucked over by Tayo, right on the heels of him helping Tayo fuck over Hour and steal her system. It took about 5 seconds flat for Amos to understand the meaning of “fuck around and find out.” Tayo tells him about the exclusions that have to be made, and Amos quickly realizes that this is about to go sideways fast. Why the hell does it take another 9 years for him to finally tell Poet what’s up? Maybe he was hoping for the best despite all the signs pointing otherwise. Indeed the show then gives us the overview of the rest of the timeline from that moment until 2034, and how the system escalates from doing a pretty good job at stopping crime to starting to obviously infringe on people’s rights and turn the country into a dystopian surveillance state hellscape.
This marks the end of The Present section of the finale, and up until this point, I think the pacing is fine. I don’t have any major issues with how they wrap up this chapter of the story or how they bring us up to speed on how the system evolved through 2034. The problem is that this then leaves the episode with 17 fucking minutes to tell the entire story in The Future of how they bring down this giant gargantuan monster they’ve created. 17 minutes!! Why?? WHY. And it’s not even 17 minutes, because several of those minutes are spent on final flashbacks to 2009! So let’s say probably more like 14 minutes. Talk about a self-inflicted wound, why would you as writers and producers give yourselves so little time to cover all this?? This is a streaming show, my dudes, 38 minutes is 4 minutes shorter than an episode of any traditional TV drama with commercials.
The reason why this show did work well for me for most of its season is because despite having to cover 25 years worth of story in 8 short episodes, it was good at picking out key scenes and really digging into them, especially the character interactions. It let you really get to know the characters and become attached to them and invested in where they would end up. There is a good example of it in The Present section of the finale, where Tayo tells Poet the story of how his dad was killed. It’s a nice moment for these two characters to reconnect over their shared goals and values. But as is not uncommon with TV shows, Class of ’09 didn’t allow itself enough space to wrap it all up in any kind of satisfying way. They threw out everything they did well in the final stretch to quickly try to wrap up the AI story and stumble across the finish line.
The Future section starts off with something pretty nonsensical plotwise, when the FBI decides to arrest Vivian for inciting violence/revolution against the system with the book she wrote that hasn’t even been released yet. This in itself checks out, but then why the hell are are they not arresting Tayo?? He literally just tried to shut down the entire system 5 seconds ago! We get no explanation as to how he got out of that pickle with a simple firing, and now he’s allowed to walk free while his wife gets arrested. It’s a pretty obvious plot contrivance to keep him free to work with Poet/Hour/Lennix to take down the system once and for all.
What I will say the show does well here is to give you that sense of dread of the hellish nightmare a system like this would turn into – every little move you make can be seen as a possible prediction of some “crime” you may commit in the future. And simply going against the system is considered a crime. Suddenly, boom, you’re getting hauled off to jail and thrown in the slammer for lord knows how long. Your fate is decided before your sham “trial” even begins. This sequence is actually pretty effectively freaky.
But by the time the episode gets through all this and finally makes it to the execution of the system takedown, there is literally 10 (TEN) minutes left of the episode, and at least 2 or 3 of those minutes are spent on 2009 flashbacks. This is the problem. With such a crazy short runtime, the writers/producers could have easily given themselves an extra 15 or 20 minutes to tell this part of the story properly, and they decided not to. It’s absolutely baffling, because it results in this entire sequence being nothing more than quick glimpses into what would have to happen if they were to execute an extremely risky and complicated plan save humanity. It feels like skimming through a checklist:
- Make it to the data center bunker thingy without getting shot down by drones
- Crack the code to get in
- Take down the drones that are inside the data center
- Use the EMP thingy to shut off the database, revert the entire database back to default factory settings, and use Amos’s little magic card thingy to set the database to read only mode.
- High-five each other, waltz out
- Wait 5 minutes for the Powers That Be to give up on the system
- Get Vivian cleared of all charges
- Mission accomplished. And they all live happily ever after.
And that’s it, just boom boom boom. Nothing goes wrong, no wrenches are thrown, no technical glitches, no extra challenges arise, everything goes to plan, no one gets hurt, the world is saved, series over. There is no suspense or edge-of-your-seat thrills in this sequence whatsoever. And it’s literally the climactic moment of the entire series. Just wham bam thank you ma’am.
And then on top of this, even the final character wrap-ups are disappointing. We get literally nothing of Hour or Lennix after the big takedown at all. Where they end up, who knows. We get no final word on any of the relationships either. I guess we’re just to assume that Poet and Lennix got married and Vivian and Tayo got back together and Hour went back to her family, but they could have spent 30 seconds showing any hint of any of that to make it feel complete.
I had some thoughts on the “best friends as life partners, almost blurring the lines between platonic love and romance” story, that I was gonna talk about in this finale review. Especially because I just watched the recent season of Somebody Somewhere, where they had a very similar storyline, between the main character and her best friend/roommate. But after watching this finale I’m kinda over it, because the episode gave me no further inspiration here. It was so focused on tying a (quick and dirty) bow on the AI storyline that it didn’t give a proper wrap-up to any of the relationships.
And what made this feel even more like a hanging thread is that the last direct interactions they gave us between any of the character pairings was negative. It was all in The Present and Past eras:
- Tayo and Vivian: Breaking up
- Poet and Lennix: Graduating and Poet clearly regretting that she’d thrown Lennix in the dumpster like she did.
- Poet and Hour: Having an epic knock down drag-out fight that breaks them up as roommates, as coworkers, and as friends.
The only character interactions that happen after this involve the group taking down the AI system in the future, with very little dialogue. There are no wrap-ups or final thoughts on the relationships. Nothing like, ya know hey this is a long epic tale of these friendships and love stories, they had their highs and their lows, and these characters were able to work through it all and come together in the end, yadda yadda. There’s nothing to drive this statement home or give closure in any way. And again given the fact that they could have easily expanded the run time of the episode an extra 15 or 20 minutes, I am beyond confounded at the choice to cut the story down to oblivion.
In my review of the first 4 eps of the series, I said: “All I ever get is little glimpses into something that could be great, if only they would do this or that. And/or flashes of things I love, that instantly disappear 2 seconds later … This series is gonna end after the next 4 short episodes and I’ll be left with TV blueballs for eternity, per usual.”
And that’s exactly what happened. What a shocking twist. This show could’ve been good if it didn’t completely flub the landing. Life is just a constant series of disappointments.
In the meantime I’ve gotten desperate enough for good entertainment that I’m digging into the archives for shows I never watched in their original runs. I’ve now watched 2 seasons of Wynonna Earp (which is 4 total seasons), and I’m blowing through it at a breakneck pace. Every ep is 42 and a half minutes long, we get 12 eps per season, and while the show is pretty chaotic, it does a decent job of telling a satisfying story each season.
I was reading the Wikipedia for the show and I had completely forgotten all the drama the show went through with its season 4 and what was supposed to also be a season 5 that SyFy had originally ordered. I guess they got totally screwed by their production company, which sucks ass. Bummer that they never got a season 5, because I’m enjoying the series so far, I could easily devour a season 5 if it existed. Oh well. TV disappointment strikes again.
Oh and Silo … at least it got renewed for season 2, I’m happy about that. 2 more eps left of that one and it’s moved a little slower than I would like, but it left us on quite a cliffhanger last week, literally. I hope the last 2 eps are exciting and at least somewhat satisfying.
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