On endings

No spoilers here, but I need to take stock of all the things I’m losing, or have lost, in the TV and film world.

Supernatural

With the news that season 15 would be its last, this show has spiralled out of the singular fandom, charities and help groups it had and erupted into world domination; those who watch it are fearful of the end of season 15, and those who don’t are dimly aware something is coming but have no clue of the repercussions.

The season 14 finale gave us everything I wanted in that we come full circle; everything the boys have achieved over the seasons may have been undone and now we have season 15 as either a clean-up or a meltdown. Who can say what it will be? Well the writers, obviously - but writers lie. I know. I’ve met them. I am one. What lies beyond this wonderfully meta finale is anyone’s guess and I can’t wait to see what happens. Even though every episode will bring us closer to the Actual End, I know I’ll be prioritising this show over all others and enjoying it whilst I can.

The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine documentary: What We Left Behind

Where do we start? I was an Indiegogo backer back in the day, and now the documentary is finally done and dusted, we get to see it before the north American cinema release (and blu ray for the rest of us). For those of us just joining us, this was a crowd-funded celebration doc for the 25th anniversary of DS9. All the other Star Trek franchises were hyped and re-released and celebrated by CBS/Paramount either at anniversary dates or just in the cause of making more money. DS9, again treated like the bastard child it was, was of course snubbed. So Ira Steven Behr and a load of others got together to make their own celebration doc, and here it is. We have writers, artists, network people, actors, characters - everything is in here. We have actors reading the original hate mail received by the writers in 1993 when the show first aired (think Mean Tweets but longer and much, much more hateful), very frank conversations about people and actors and make-up, some HD renderings of some of the best moments of DS9, and some special appearances that will make you squee and clap and miss DS9 all over again.

Those were the Star Trek years, indeed.

With my backer’s bundle I got access to an early streaming version of the doc, and I have to say now that I’ve watched it twice it’s awesome. All that remains is for CBS to proper convert the entire 7 seasons to HD/blu ray so that when I binge watch it again (and I will, for perhaps the 4th time in its entirety) it’ll look more like Star Trek and less like a VHS bootleg. I mean come on - have you seen it on Netflix? It looks like a worn-out VHS copy and I’m not even joking. As one of the best, most progressive, and most important Treks, it deserves better.

Anyway, that aside, it brings me back to wondering if, 2 years from now when Supernatural has been off the air for 12 months and I miss is, if I’ll be rewatching it the same as I do DS9. Something tells me yes.

Avengers: Endgame

Wow. Just wow. I know everyone else is going off like a frog in a sock about this, but I have a major problem with one element that makes me go NOPE. It feels like lazy writing and I have to be honest, it makes no sense and it’s not fair to the characters involved. I don’t mean the other heavyweights in this, I mean the character they did it to. I can’t go into details but at some point I fucking will and it won’t be pretty. There’s also the little wrinkle of a certain character not ending up how I’d like, and the fact that they didn’t fucking deserve it, and the moment of the Mary Sue pretending that the mere mention of one gay person once in the background means that Marvel is all LGBTQ+ friendly now. Not enough, dumbasses; not nearly enough. And how you shat on a few characters? Not cool, Russo brothers, not cool.

I’m mostly ok with how it turned out though, however I would have cut about 20 minutes out of it and some characters weren’t in it nearly enough. It’s always sad to see the end of an era, and everything from the moment we first saw Tony Stark build a Mark I suit is pretty much brought to a close. There are other, Tier 2 Avengers / non-Avengers movies coming out, but for right now, it’s ok for the Tier 1 Marvel Avengers stories to end like this.

Gotham

And so to the 5 season saga of how everyone came to be villains, heroes and Big Names in Gotham City. The season and indeed series finale, continuing a theme here, gave us everything we needed. With its final episode the series made good on the promise that was made to us in the opening scenes of the very first episode, when young Bruce Wayne’s parents were killed in an alleyway. We have all our major players, we have our main characters, and we even have all our second tier characters in place so that, in line with the bulk of canon, they can go on to become the other characters in comics and DCU movies.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; it’s a great, great shame that they don’t make DC movies the same way they made this DC series. Somewhere between Man of Steel and Legends of Tomorrow, Gotham knew what it was and never forgot it. It gave us humour through straight-faced characters who were not ashamed to be super villains or superheroes; it gave us some bizarre and dare I say it, batshit-crazy plot lines - but it never stopped believing in itself. It knew what it was and it didn’t shy away from it. The writers dared to go with frankly quite unbelievable storylines at times, but hey, this is a show about normal people gradually being turned into super names of all kinds, and at some point you have to just accept the fact that if other comic studios can have people turning into giant green rage monsters, then others can have humans without superpowers who are just trying to take over a city and if a vat of chemicals gets in the way, then ok, we roll with it.

Fun, balls-to-the-wall incredible and ‘out there’, it was a good series and I’ll miss it next week when it’s not there. I hope DC take note; this was the best of their TV fare.

And that’s all the endings that I want to talk about. There are others, but not the TV or movie kind. I’ll get to those, but another day.

Peach and lube, everyone. Peach and lube.