y’all, it pains me to say this, it really does but... it’s gotta be said. a little bit. spoilers and bummers under the cut, so if ur riding the positivity wagon i would go no further on this one.
i cannot possibly imagine that those of us who’ve been watching this show since S1 would disagree with the notion that it is 100% not the same show it was during S1-S3. the first (3) seasons of this show were absolutely lovely and i would not trade them for the entire world.
as i’ve already admitted, i didn’t fuck with S4, and i have barely fucked with S5. i watched the first couple episodes and skipped straight to last night’s episode and i gotta say, what the fuck. seriously. i love teresa. i love james. i love the two of them together, but when he said “i love you,” i legitimately felt nothing. all the subtle character work that had been done in the first few seasons; the reason why we fell in love with them (and the two of them with each other) in the first place? essentially nowhere to be found. like, we knew we were always gonna get there, but i had never hoped it would be in the midst of the most inane, rushed bullshit. i’ve chatted with @mymostimaginaryfriend about this, but i just can’t imagine why you’d try to wrap up such an involved plot in (10) freaking episodes instead of just enriching ur character work as much as possible. it’s not as if ur gonna get cancelled; the show’s over!
and jeresa aside, what is with the dialogue this season? thanks for telling me word-for-word that the CIA is essentially a cartel, i would never have been able to make the cognitive leap myself. the first three seasons of this show were good because they were challenging and they very much respected the intelligence of the audience. there was just so much to mine in almost every single episode. that was part of what i loved about it, and that energy is just... totally gone.
one final note here, because i’d rather not wade in the muck of this for too long, but are they really expecting us to think that james would legitimately kill her? what are they trying to achieve here? we did the “maybe james is a villain, maybe he isn’t,” bit already, and it was far more nuanced than whatever the fuck the last few minutes of this episode was.
listen. i get that it must have been challenging, having a shortened final season on top of a S4 that was likely totally fucked with by peter gadiot’s departure (and that’s just speculation on my part), but i have a hard time believing they couldn’t have done marginally better than this. there were distant echoes of what the characters used to be, but ultimately almost every gesture has fallen horribly flat. i know there’s one more episode, so maybe i’ll be able to find something redeeming about it, but apparently the only writing team on earth capable of salvaging gold from the mud of early cancellation was for NBC’s life and no one will ever be able to do it again.
fucking bummer, folks. just an absolute bummer.