Do you ever find yourself ...
Question: Do you ever find yourself getting sick of "shock-ending" season finales? I bring this up because I just finished watching the "mid-season finale" of one of my favorite shows, Sci Fi's
Eureka. (Spoiler alert.) In the last minutes of the episode, Sheriff Carter is fired. To me, this seems pointless. We all know Carter isn't going to stay fired. Moreover, no one who wasn't already tuning in is going to come back specifically to see if Carter is actually fired, so the whole thing doesn't even achieve the desired result. What it does do is make me dread the season opener where we have to sit through at least one episode wasted on the characters extracting themselves from a situation that was obviously created for nothing more than shock value. (I guess you have to give kudos to
House for being the one show to actually follow through with this sort of thing, but being that it ended in disaster I'd almost say it validates my point more.) Don't get me wrong, I'm not against cliff-hanger season finales. I'm simply saying that, if they are going to have a cliff-hanger, it should have some substance. Not just one line of "out of nowhere" dialogue tacked on to the end of the script that creates a situation which everyone knows will have no lasting impact.
Answer: It's been a busy week, so I haven't caught up with the
Eureka finale yet and can't comment on the particulars, but in general, you're right. It's as if they think we haven't spent our whole lives watching TV. We know how it works. Colin Ferguson isn't about to leave
Eureka any more than David Caruso was actually dead on the tarmac on
CSI: Miami. It can feel insulting (unless, of course, the producers have a trick up their sleeves). But then, there's a situation like last season's split-up-the-team cliffhanger on
NCIS, which riled a lot of fans over the summer (especially in the wake of what had just happened on
House), and while this was obviously a contrived fake-out, it resulted in a fun season opener as we learned the "new team" was basically an attempt to smoke out a mole, so it turned out to be a pretty good story.
